Understanding Resilience in School Children

Understanding Resilience:
Implications for Inner-City Schools and Their Near and Far Communities

H. Jerome Freiberg
University of Houston

Freiberg, H. J. (1994). Understanding resilience: Implications for inner-city schools and their near and far communities. In M. C. Wang & E. W. Gordon (Eds.), Educational resilience in inner-city America: Challenges and prospects, pp. 151-165. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.

Why do some children survive, in fact flourish, in the most adverse conditions? This question reflects an area of research and discussion that has been missing from recent literature on the inner cities. The preoccupation with the failings of the urban environment and its inner-city schools has masked an opportunity to examine the successes. The study of resilience provides an important environment for discussing attributes of families, students peers, schools and communities that foster resilience in the inner cities. This chapter provides direction for future research that examines alterable variables for creating constructs of resilience, building on proactive and additive models, rather than on individual or collective deficits.

Defining Resilience

The examination of resilience must draw from across the literature (Carta, 1991; Garmezy, 1974, 1991; Kagan, 19990; Werner, 1989; Winfield,1991) of the helping professions (counseling, education, psychology, and sociology) to define and construct working definitions for resilience that are transferable to educational setting in the inner cities. The literature (Eisenberg, 1982, Hogman, 1983; Kestenberg, 1982) supports additional views that resilience in children is the ability to learn from and seek out the positive (and not replicate the disabling) elements of their environment. Studies of children who survived Nazi concentration camps and separation from their parents during World War II found that children had a definable set of resilient characteristics.

Studies of Resilience

Studies of resilience draw from the literature on children, youth, and adults who move beyond the pathology of their current lives to become healthy and productive individuals. Examples of resilience can be gleaned from holocaust survivors to dysfunctional families to decaying inner-city schools and communities. The following is a selective review of the research literature from the helping professions. The studies build a case for establishing protective strategies that lead to greater resilience, as opposed to focusing on risk factors alone. Additionally, this chapter explores the role of schools and communities as partners in accelerating the protective factors of youth who live in at-risk environments.

Holocaust Survivors
     Using a series of interviews, Hogman (1983) developed case histories of 11 adults who as children (aged 2 weeks to 11 years old) survived the Holocaust. Her study indicated that children who either saw their parents killed or became permanently separated from them, built their lives on a set of family values, cultural identities, and religious beliefs that sustained and protected them in desperate times. She found that "The Existence of memories, especially happy ones, seemed to help survivors fill the vacuum crated by the war"
     Very young children, the author concluded, suffered the greatest problem as adults because they lacked memories and constructive role models. The successful survivors also had a strong sense of defiance that propelled them into adulthood. for many of the children, detailed fantasies about parents helped create an inner emotional climate to minimize the trauma of their environment.
     Resilience may be viewed as the ability to become proactive rather than reactive. The sense of responsibility for siblings as well as nonfamily in the concentration camps helped the survivors as adults. Hogan concluded that "from trauma can emerge a new identity; trauma does not only create psychopathology". The affective qualities evident in studies of survivors of the Holocaust are also reflected as important factors in healthy children, adolescents, and adults.

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