Inclusion and Exclusion at the Heart of Global Perspectives on Teacher Resilience

Speakers: Carmela Aprea; Elena Boldrini

An extensive body of literature has shown a multitude of risk and protective factors that influence teachers’ resilience. Diversity is one of those factors, an issue which is especially prevalent for teachers in vocational and training, mainly because of the following reasons: First, teachers in this area are usually trained as professionals in a specific vocational field. Thus, they very often combine teaching with another job, and consequently experience diversity between their diffrent workplaces, i.e. school and company. Secondly, vocational school students are a quite heterogeneous target group, e.g. with regard to their educational, motivational, cultural and linguistic background. Based on the conceptualization of teacher resilience as multifaceted construct (e.g., Mansfield et al., 2016) and on data from survey and interview studies in Switzerland and Germany, our presentation is focused on the question of how perceived diversity impacts different resilience outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, work engagement, self-efficacy) of teachers in vocational education and training.

Speakers: Caroline Mansfield; Susan Beltman

Teacher resilience has become an increasingly prominent issue, especially when teachers are working in contexts where there are multiple and complex risk factors and communities experiencing disadvantage. However, teacher professional learning about resilience has typically involved face to face, formal workshop style events or in-services, and talks by experts within a set and fixed time frame. Furthermore, availability and access to such experiences is dependent on school and sector resources and priorities. This presentation will describe a freely available, online, personalised and self-directed resource that aims to increase users’ awareness of the skills and strategies for enhancing resilience in the teaching profession (Mansfield, Beltman, Broadley & Weatherby-Fell, 2016). Using data gathered via website analytics, user behaviour of over 5,000 users in the online environment will be explored. Findings and implications for provision of online teacher professional learning especially regarding resilience will be discussed.

Speakers: Qiong Li; Qing Gu

This study investigated how Chinese teachers working in socio-economically disadvantaged rural schools draw upon their capacities for resilience to maintain a sense of professional identity, motivation and commitment. Drawing upon Bronfenbrenner’s ecological system theory and in-depth interviews with eight teachers with different years of experience, the study identified a range of personal, relational, organisational and policy influences which are specific to the rural contexts and which challenge teachers’ capacity to be resilient. Ten personal and contextual resources were perceived to be essential in enabling them to sustain their everyday resilience over time. Personal resources, which acted as inner drives or buffers against burnout, included occupational commitment, strong intrinsic motivation, and academic optimism. Trusting relationships in school and various internal and external professional networks were also found to be important contextual resources for rural teachers working in remote areas to overcome challenges and sustain their capacity to committed and resilient.