Rebecca and I have been involved in a project with colleagues from the University of Gloucestershire exploring resilience. We come from a range of educational backgrounds and interests including: sustainability, policy, vulnerability, inclusion and resilience. This shared interest has resulted in collaborating on a book around the topic area of resilience “Reconsidering Resilience in Education” which is due to be published in September 2020 by Springer. In one of our first planning meetings we were sharing ideas about resilience and how it might be applied to our different areas of interest. During one particularly focused afternoon we ended up developing a model which captured our different areas of interest but also aimed to help develop a more ‘dynamic’ and systemic understanding of resilience rather than the static ‘within-person’ approach. This emerged as a result of our concerns around the rise of manualised programmes and government discussion on building ‘character’ and resilience where the emphasis is on the individual to change regardless of the context in which they find themselves placed. We have called this the Dynamic Interactive Model of Resilience (the DIMoR).
Significant in the model is the idea that children and young people are active participants in their own lives who have developed their own coping strategies, which should be respected, rather than passive victims of events. The focus is on individual qualities and how others around the children and young people can support healthy development despite disadvantages in their environment (of which the Covid 19 situation is a particularly current). The model also draws on the thinking that in some circumstances the individual qualities of the child or young person is more influential to their development but in other circumstance their environment is more significant. The DIMoR also emphasises the importance of the child/young persons own thoughts and feelings as to what works for them.
This model is helpful in trying to understand what is going on for a child or young person and then helping us to analyse what we can do to help support their developing resilience – either with the child/young person themselves or with significant people around them.
We are really excited to announce that the paper where we outline and explain the model has just been published. We would be interested in any thoughts and feedback that you may have.
If you would be interested in reading the paper in more detail, you can access it via the link below.