Cultural Considerations in Resilience Building
摘要
Every child has unique strengths that can be nurtured into forms of resilience. During childhood, culture frames the developmental process of acquiring skills to overcome adversity in terms of expectations and available protective resources. As youth navigate experiences of adversity, they look to adults in their environment to form concepts of how to adapt positively to these events. Educators may especially benefit from a culturally informed approach to youth resilience given their role in educating, socializing, and supporting students. This chapter explores diverse examples of resilience in childhood as well as the shared mechanisms across cultures that promote youth resilience. Culture is an expansive term that describes characteristics unique to each person, including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, faith, and locale. In the discussion of youth resilience. Culture adds a compelling layer given that varied definitions of “adapting positively” exist within culture and the signal desired behaviors and attitudes in the face of adversity. At the same time, unified themes of cultural resilience are reliably observed in all cultures. These cross-cultural threads are highly valuable to practitioners who want to identify and develop naturally occurring protective factors for students. Therefore, a framework of cultural characteristics of resilience is applied to elucidate the assets of youth across cultures: (1) material resources, (2) relationships, (3) identity, (4) cohesion, (5) power and control, (6) social justice, and (7) cultural adherence. Then, the domains of school climate that correspond to these characteristics are identified as avenues for school-based intervention: (1) physical environment, (2) norms, goals, and values, (3) relationships, and (4) instruction and learning. The goals of this chapter are to highlight how culture encompasses resilience and to describe how coping assets can be transmitted to youth in the school context.