Purposes

The research investigated how teachers in a school in a socially, emotionally and academically disadvantaged urban setting drew upon their capacities for resilience in order to maintain a stable sense of positive professional identity, moral purpose, and teaching effectiveness. It sought to identify similarities and differences between their levels of everyday resilience capacity and the part played in this by individual, school, external policy and social contexts.

Theoretical Framework

An increasing amount of research on teacher attrition and its counterpart, teacher retention, focuses on deteriorations in teachers’ working conditions and challenges to traditional notions of teacher professionalism which are claimed to be caused by the demands of new public management and policy led reforms. These are shown to be mediated, positively or negatively, by school conditions (Boyd et al., 2011; Johnson, Kraft, & Papay, 2012; Loeb, Darling-Hammond, & Luczak, 2005). This paper reports research that investigated the lives of all the teachers in one average size primary school in an impoverished area in the East Midland region of England. These teachers may be described as ‘living on the edge’, teaching in circumstances that require the management of constant emotional, intellectual, personal and professional challenges to succeed in engaging students in learning and achievement. It takes as its point of departure, that resilience is, “the capacity to maintain equilibrium and a sense of commitment and agency in the everyday worlds in which teachers work” (Author et al., 2013, p.26).

Research Questions

(1)   What kinds of individual and collective emotional and academic challenges do teachers who work in highly disadvantaged urban school settings experience?

(2)   What personal, workplace, social and policy factors influence teachers’ capacities for resilience?

(3)   Are there variations between teachers’ capacities for resilience?

How do teachers perceive the associations between their resilience capacity and their ability to teach effectively? 

Findings

This research reaffirms previous research that points to the importance of the capacity for resilience as a key contributory factor to teachers’ ability to sustain commitment to their work as professionals generally and as professionals in this particular school. It adds new findings about the nature of emotional resilience needs of teachers who work in areas of socio-economic disadvantage. It finds that it is not one but a combination of intrinsic motivation, workplace and outside school support that provides teachers with the strength, self-efficacy and encouragement to continue to devote themselves in highly challenging environments. It finds, also, that there are variations as well as similarities in the ways and the extent to which teachers are able to manage the challenges they face, and that these are perceived by them to affect their ability to engage their students in learning and achievement. Finally, it suggests that ‘collective’ as well as ‘individual’ capacities for resilience can be built by head teachers and that these are associated with teacher effectiveness and retention.

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