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Teacher Championship of Resilience: Lessons from the Pathways to Resilience Study, South Africa

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Abstract

Resilience, or the process of adjusting well to adversity, is a process that requires input from social ecologies. The resilience literature is unambiguous that a crucial source of such social-ecological support is teachers. However, most accounts of how teachers enable resilience are drawn from Global North studies (i.e. studies in the more developed countries of the Northern hemisphere). To address this gap, my chapter reports how high school teachers from rural, disadvantaged contexts in South Africa informed the resilience of their students. To do so, I draw on phenomenological data generated by 230 Sesotho-speaking adolescents who participated in the Pathways to Resilience Study. Using the lens of Ungar’s Social Ecology of Resilience Theory, I extrapolate teacher actions that enabled students to accommodate structural adversities. I then draw attention to resilience-supporting actions that teachers did not advance. I use both these teacher actions and apathies to theorise changes to teacher education if teachers are to champion resilience in Global South contexts.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Linda C. Theron

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  1. Linda C. Theron
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Correspondence to Linda C. Theron .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Education, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Marold Wosnitza

  2. ISPA-Instituto Universitário/CIE – ISPA, Lisbon, Portugal

    Francisco Peixoto

  3. School of Education, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia

    Susan Beltman

  4. School of Education, Murdoch University, Perth, WA, Australia

    Caroline F. Mansfield

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Theron, L.C. (2018). Teacher Championship of Resilience: Lessons from the Pathways to Resilience Study, South Africa. In: Wosnitza, M., Peixoto, F., Beltman, S., Mansfield, C.F. (eds) Resilience in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76690-4_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76690-4_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76689-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76690-4

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