Developing Resilience in FE Teaching

David Allan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000571318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Developing Resilience in FE Teaching explores the essence of resilience and provides practical approaches for working in the Further Education sector. Emphasising the importance of reflection and self-growth, it outlines strategies to help teachers identify and deal with stress, using real-life case studies to exemplify key concerns.

This book is divided into three main sections: Part One identifies the sector's needs and recognizes resilience as a key attribute for FE teachers to survive and thrive in the modern world, explores the importance of strength and positivity in both physical and mental health, and examines the many ways in which these contribute to the development of individual resilience; Part Two outlines a variety of practical strategies and approaches for teachers to utilise their experiences to construct resilience over time; and Part Three presents real-life scenarios of resilience-building from various professionals working in the sector.

Developing Resilience in FE Teaching synthesizes a wide range of current ideas and research to provide a practical and useful guide for FE teachers, and for those working in the FE sector. It serves as an important resource for teachers and equips them with the necessary skills to become resilient professionals in the modern workplace.

Part 1

Resilience and the individual

DOI: 10.4324/9780367824211-1

1 The need for resilience

DOI: 10.4324/9780367824211-2

What is resilience?

‘Barn’s burnt down. Now I can see the moon.’

(attributed to Mizuta Masahide, seventeenth-century Samurai poet and physician)

According to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (2021), resilience is defined as, ‘The action or an act of rebounding or springing back.’ To illustrate this, Lexico (2021) provides a range of interesting synonyms: ‘flexibility, pliability, suppleness, plasticity, elasticity, springiness, spring, give, durability, ability to last, strength, sturdiness, toughness.’ The ability to restore life to some form of normality after a particularly impactful upheaval is an important characteristic for teachers as they are often modelling good practice. However, resilience in teaching is much more than a retrospective approach to stress. Teachers are required to be prepared and thus exhibit signs of forthcoming resilience. This type of resilience is about having the strength beforehand to know that whatever happens you will try to cope. In this way, resilience is not immunity from stress, but the ability to cope with such stress in positive and productive ways (Zagalaz et al., 2020). This takes us beyond the use of resilience as a mechanism for resuming the status quo.

Resilience described as ‘bouncing back’ has also been criticised as it ‘unrealistically suggests the absence of inner turmoil during this time’ (Neenan, 2018, p. 2). In support of this, Gu and Day (2013, p. 26) state that resilience is ‘the capacity to maintain equilibrium and a sense of commitment and agency in the everyday worlds in which teachers teach.’ To go further, a review of the psychological literature by Färber and Rosendahl (2018, p. 621) noted that resilience is ‘the term used to describe an individual’s positive adaptation in the face of adversity, i.e. one’s success in dealing healthily with significant stressors.’ As such, resilience involves a form of ‘successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances’ (Masten, Best & Garmezy, 1990, p. 425). In this way, hurdles are overcome and risks are mitigated as individuals negotiate their way through various difficulties. At a more extreme level, challenges may pose a risk to health, wellbeing and/or general safety and thus require more severe ‘survival’ tactics. Resilience, then, is a characteristic that may help us wade through the mire of short-term difficulties but is also one in which life-threatening situations can be tackled through the biological response of fight rather than flight. Resilience is also a changeable characteristic, and its ingredients vary from person to person (Rutter, 1987).

Perspective

It may seem cliched to ask you to think about those people who have lost their homes and have continued optimistically, or about those who fought in a world war and so on. But at times this sort of perspective can help, particularly where these examples are taken from real life. We all have our own problems but in reality those problems are often small in comparison to the suffering of some individuals in this world. Moreover, it is often the individuals who have undergone much trauma who are the most resilient in life. As Morris (2004, p. 1) notes, ‘Challenging times demand inner strength and a spirit that won’t be defeated.’ Through the use of perspective, you are not just comparing your life with somebody else’s and saying ‘it could have been a lot worse,’ or, ‘how lucky am I?’ You are putting a context to your particular situation in order to frame your understanding. If you haven’t suffered in the same way as these examples then these sentiments are probably true but perhaps difficult to accept. You may be of the opinion that this is your life, it is different, and what happens matters much more to you, regardless of how someone may trivialise the details. This is, of course, true. But what you can take from these extreme examples is the degree to which the individuals continued with their lives, refusing to give up. What compelled them to carry on? Where does that inner courage come from?

Resilience helps us to survive through difficult times and often when we are against the odds. From the Indonesian man who returned to the place where his house once stood – having now been destroyed by a tsunami – and said, ‘Oh well, it’s only a house. It can be replaced. At least my family is safe’ before gathering whatever resources he could find to build a new home for his family, to ‘Maria,’ an incredibly strong Ukrainian woman who ‘survived the Nazi invasion, the Chernobyl disaster and Soviet rule, and vowed to never leave her home’ (see Flanagan, 2019), the world is replete with amazing stories of fortitude and resilience. Whilst these examples may situate our difficulty with some perspective, there is no getting away from the fact that what matters to us is what affects us, and even the most trivial situation can be overwhelming if we are not prepared. Just because we have not lost our house does not mean that we will not be stressed or won’t experience real difficulty in coping.

The difference between acceptance and a realistic understanding

Resilience sustains happiness and helps us to accept that change is often inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we should merely be content with a situation. Developing resilience is also about resistance but accepting that bad circumstances happen to many of us is not quite the same as allowing these to impact on us. Resilience helps us to resist the urge to give up. It is our way of fighting through an event and eventually overcoming the difficulties. If we merely accept something, without challenge, we fail to utilise the power we have to make changes. But sometimes we need a realistic outlook, and having an approach in which we refuse to accept anything can be counterproductive. Take, for instance, the difference between the following two situations:

1. Your boss has been making unreasonable demands on you over the last two months.
2. Due to the low number of enrolments, the college has stated that your course will no longer be running and that you are to be made redundant.

A major difference between the two is the element of control that you have. You can mitigate the redundancy situation by seeking employment elsewhere, or perhaps if there are opportunities to teach across other programmes, but you may be limited in what you can do to change the situation. Some acceptance is thus needed that this will likely result in a change to your circumstances. For the unreasonable demands, however, you can demonstrate to your boss the impact this is having on your work; you can appeal to your boss’s line manager; and, you can even make a complaint. You may not be able to cease the demands, of course, but you do have some pushback power. Both situations are not only different, the implications for each will vary, but a realistic perspective will enable you to identify whether you should challenge it or accept it and move on. Resistance is a strong tool in your arsenal but you should be aware of the impact it is having on your confidence and self-belief and thus act accordingly. Many people feel that resistance is beyond their power and that they have to yield. But if the stressor is placed into perspective, then a relevant plan for dealing with it can be devised.

Born to be resilient?

Fortunately, research tells us that resilience is not wholly innate; rather, it is perceived as a combination of genetic and environmental factors (Amstadter, Myers & Kendler, 2014). As such, resilience is an aspect of your personality that has been shaped by various experiences and this can mean that you are likely to be more resilient at certain times in your life and perhaps less resilient in others (Zagalaz et al., 2020). For example, the death of a loved one is a horrific event and is unfortunately an inevitable part of most people’s lives. Some deal with this by showing strength of character and continuing with their lives, mourning when appropriate but also striving to function as normatively as possible. Often, having another loved one to care for encourages resilience through distraction. For some, however, the ability to cope in such situations is too much and merely drawing on one’s inner resources is not enough to survive the ordeal. But this does not mean that they lack resilience; rather, we all function within our individual constraints. Resilience is not an uncaring response to a fraught situation; it is surviving through adversity.

Although there are pre-determined features that will steer you in a particular way, and it is likely that these will regulate your general approach, it is also common for some people to demonstrate strong resilience in one day yet very little in another. In developing resilience, you are not trying to change an immutable characteristic, such as your height; rather, you are working on your mindset, your outlook on life, and your disposition. Your disposition can be difficult to challenge as it is to some extent ground into your character. However, you will have accrued a huge amount of learned behaviour throughout your lifetime and will be evolving regularly. Changing your disposition is heavily dependent on your situation and your outlook (indeed, it drives your outlook), and many factors can affect this on a daily basis. But resilience is something you can develop with practice. Practising to deal with difficult situations when they arise is a great exercise for developing resilience as it encourages you to avoid stagnating and can prevent the situation from exacerbating. It is not a substitute for the real experience, but when combined with reflective practice (see Chapter 9), it is a way for you to record the times when you have been resilient and why that may be so. Moreover, you are likely to remember those experiences if you have had to grapple with them.

As you can develop resilience, you may find it useful to tackle a situation in small steps. How you conduct yourself, how you approach a challenge, and what you feel inside are important factors yet, fortunately, within your control. But you have to be realistic in that this is by no means an easy journey if your resilience is historically poor, or if you typically struggle with increased stress and anxiety when faced with a problem. The problem may seem insurmountable (and some are, of course, and should be acknowledged as so), but categorising it will help as this will give you a realistic perspective of what you are facing.

Dealing with stress

Stress is a condition that you mostly absorb and thus place on yourself. For instance, if a deadline has been imposed on you, how you choose to perceive that deadline is up to you. Even though this is easier said than done, you can situate the deadline differently so that you are confident and prepared to tackle it, rather than perceiving it as burdensome and overwhelming. It is fortunate that you are not born with a limited supply of resilience because you can work on developing it. But this also means that you will have to work hard to do this if it requires a change in your outlook. Developing resilience will need to become part of your life and small steps are key; the first of which may be to place the stress into context. How important is this deadline? Is there a possibility for an extension if you are overwhelmed? Smaller stressors serve as a useful strategy for developing an approach to becoming resilient, and this can be used to tackle some of the larger stressors of the sector.

In 2018, the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ annual report on spending on English education reported that since 2010, the Further Education and Skills sector has witnessed ‘significant cuts to spending per student’ (Belfield, Farquharson & Sibieta, 2018, p. 4). The sector has also borne out a comparatively poor rate of inflation for its teaching staff, despite the fact that ‘Participation in full-time 16–18 education has more than doubled since the 1980s’ (Belfield, Farquharson & Sibieta, 2018, p. 7). Moreover, measures such as the pressure to increase the sector’s contribution to employment and the economy, the implementation of area reviews and mergers, changes to the funding for 16–19 students, and a general expectation to embed English and maths in most subjects can actively increase stress levels for both lecturers and students alike.

The modern teacher: Living or existing?

Today’s world is driven by many social, cultural, and economic pressures that impinge on our professional lives and thus add to the existing demands of teaching. From the impact of technology and social media on the working day – with teachers taking home work-related concerns and struggling to switch off at a healthy hour – to pay freezes, disproportionate status across other sectors and general austerity measures within the FE sector that disrupt practices and impinge on motivation and enthusiasm; from the difficulty in engaging with students when (at the time of writing) the world is in the middle of a global pandemic and people are socially distancing to college mergers and job insecurity; from pressures to embed skills we may not have the confidence for (English and maths) to expectations that FE lecturers should engage with research as part of their professional development, the modern FE world presents many challenges for surviving in the profession.

For teachers, however, mere survival is inadequate as they must thrive. Teachers lead the way in their institutions. They motivate and inspire, they stimulate and incentivise, and they instil a passion fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1: Resilience and the individual
• PART 2: Strategising for resilience
• PART 3: Stories of resilience
• Index