Educational psychology and resilience in developing contexts: a rejoinder to Toland and Carrigan (2011)

Abstract

If educational psychologists wish to make a meaningful difference as practitioners, both to the children they work with and the ecologies these children come from, then, knowledge and application of resilience theory is crucial. Toland and Carrigan (2011) underscore this relationship in their 2011 article in this Journal. In our contribution below, we extend their assertion by urging greater attention to the interactive processes which underpin resilience and, more particularly, to how proximal, face-to-face transactions embedded in mesosystems and microsystems and nuanced by the distal, macrosystemic influences, mould resilience. Using examples from resilience research conducted in South Africa we argue that such a focus (i.e. on the transactional ecosystemic nature of resilience) is crucial in developing contexts. Furthermore, we contend that sensitivity to mechanisms of resilience as well as the contexts and cultures in which these continuously evolve, begs an approach to practice that foregrounds the ecosystemic, promotes child-ecology transactions, and is cautious about generalizing resilience theory to children across diverse contexts, cultures and time periods. To conceptualize resilience as anything but a reciprocal, dynamic, contextually-influenced interaction between children and their ecologies, would be to fail children in developing contexts.