Resilience and Student Engagement: Promotive and Protective Processes in Schools

Effective schools buffer students against the effects of adversity on learning and positive adjustment in the present and prepare them for future resilience. This chapter draws on the developmental literature about resilience in children and the educational psychology literature on student engagement to highlight the multifaceted role of schools in resilience. We adopt a scalable and multidisciplinary systems definition of resilience as the capacity of a dynamic system to adapt successfully to challenges that threaten the function, survival, or development of the system. We consider the multifaceted roles in promoting and nurturing resilience of student engagement, broadly defined to include behavioral, emotional, and cognitive processes that connect students to learning and their school communities. Student engagement affords greater access to resources and resilience capacity that can protect children at risk due to acute and chronic adverse childhood experiences while also facilitating the development of resilience factors widely implicated as the building blocks of future competence and resilience. Student engagement processes mediate, moderate, and reflect the processes by which school systems can support and nurture student resilience through multisystem interactions. A “short list” of resilience factors consistently associated with student resilience is delineated along with multiple ways that schools support and nurture these influential factors. Schools can mitigate risk, provide an array of resources and opportunities, and simultaneously nurture powerful adaptive systems that build future resilience for individuals and thereby their communities and societies.