to seeking to understand the special capacities that thriving children had, terms such as “invulnerability,” “adaptation,” and “competence” were used by researchers.
The idea of “competence” as a positive attribute to be studied exemplifies the switch to studying positive capacities in children instead of keeping track of the trauma surrounding them. Ann Masten, herself a pioneer in this area, tracks the development of the field in “Resilience in Developmental Psychopathology: Contributions of the Project Competence Longitudinal Study,” written in 2012. Masten writes, “To investigate resilience, we defined and measured the quality of adaptive behavior . . . the nature and severity of adversity or risk encountered, and the individual or contextual differences that might account for the variable patterns of adaptation.”4 Note that current resilience research still focuses on the behaviors and capacities of individual children—developmental psychologists have made recommendations to parents and teachers, but teachers have not made links between what makes up resilience and what can be taught or fostered at school. A current scan of the field of resilience in education reveals studies for teachers about resilience and programs that can build resilience in at-risk youth, but there is no mention of how resilience and inter-religious education may be linked, or how they can benefit from one another. Currently we know a great deal about resilient children and even about the resources that sustain them. Next steps for widening the field will include broadening our understanding of resilience in adult populations, linking resilience to specific areas, like inter-religious education, and learning how such connections cause learning to flourish (or not).
In this section, we will briefly examine key features of resiliency as it has been applied in developmental psychology and education, with particular attention to the latter. This research seeks to explore if and how resiliency might be an essential ingredient for inter-religious education. To that end, we will connect aspects of resilience that are particularly integral to inter-religious learning.
In 1970, the father of resiliency research, Norman Garmezy, presented a paper entitled “Vulnerability Research and the Issue of Primary Prevention” at the annual meeting of the American Orthopsychiatric5 Association. By “primary prevention,” Garmezy means “coping,” and he sought to understand how some young people—even with few resources—coped with stress and trauma better than others. This was a puzzle; researchers were seeking to learn why some children succeeded against all odds. Could they learn from those “high risk” children? As Garmezy put it, “a simple declaration of physical, psychosocial or sociocultural resources cannot explain divergent paths to adaptation or to deviance.”6 This “variability in outcomes”7 led to Garmezy’s consideration of development from the end (either the traumatized and not flourishing, or traumatized and still flourishing) child, to try and determine what had justified that outcome. This was a new lens with which to consider the outcome—previously, researchers (including Garmezy) had begun with the starting situation or traumas (poverty, illness, sick mother, low IQ). Garmezy marks this new lens and the meaning for how researchers saw children within the context of his outcomes as he writes,
Provide us with a slum child who is forging a pattern of strength and we will cast about for environmental surrogates who must have served as inoculators against despair, for events that must have encouraged hope rather than hopelessness, for inner resources that must have proclaimed vitality rather than helplessness. However, were we to convert this same slum child into someone prone to violence or aberration, our focus would be turned with equal efficiency and perhaps even greater facility to alternate figures and facets that would buttress our perception of deviance.8
Note that even Garmezy’s verb “inoculate” suggests the idea that something external, when applied to a child, can foster healing and strength. Instead, what Garmezy and his peers find is that the strength is already present within some children and adults.
How does this relate to possibilities for inter-religious education? When we examine engagement in inter-religious settings, we will find that some participants are able to withstand the disruption and dissonance of alterity better than others. And yet, learning cannot take place if participants abandon the project as soon as they feel uncomfortable. One task of inter-religious educators and facilitators is to create containers and methods to foster a kind of in-the-moment resiliency in students, so that they might draw upon interior and even external resources (their relationship with peers, support from the instructor, the required nature of a course as extrinsic motivation) to remain participants.
Just as reflective practice ought to be the focus of educational activities, especially in inter-religious settings, so too can resilience be included in models and practices that can be taught and fostered. Although Garmezy made this move in 1970, it is still infrequently included in stated capacities for inter-religious learning, or even religious or multi-cultural learning. Garmezy’s early questions provide some ideas for qualities we can examine in this project. He writes,
Can we use our schools and clinics as centers for training these [high-risk] children in more adaptive techniques for coping? Can we use participation in successful play to increase the flexibility of the response repertoires of these children? Can we stimulate adaptive behavior by introducing into such training centers healthy children who can serve as models for the vulnerable child?9
We might well ask the following questions: Can we use our spaces of inter-religious encounter as centers for training students in more adaptive techniques for prolonged engagement with others? Can we use participation in study groups and microteaching to increase the flexibility of response repertoires of these students? Can we stimulate practice in withstanding disruption by introducing models for successful relationship and engagement?
In this chapter, we will explore major themes in resilience research and discover which features might be salient for religious-and inter-religious education. All three strands of our understanding of resilience—competence, coping, and community—offer something that we might glean for inter-religious education.
Even after Garmezy made the initial move from focusing on the negative to examining what might “inoculate” some children against trauma, researchers still tracked the negative attributes of children’s surroundings and circumstances. However, once researchers moved to considering the development of “competence,” some positive attributes came into focus. Ingrid Schoon, in her book Risk and Resilience: Adaptations in Changing Times, identifies the pitfall in focusing on the negative, and demonstrates how far the field had come by 2006. Schoon argues, “A focus on resilience and resources, on the other hand, aims to understand adaptive development in spite of risk exposure and to maximise [sic] wellness even before maladjustment has occurred,”10 and underscores her point, writing, “the resilience framework entails emphasis not on deficits but on areas of strength.”11 As we shall see, once researchers began considering areas of strength as well as deficit, and examined “understanding adaptive development” as part of a wider interpersonal matrix, the field began to include capacities that can be isolated, taught, developed, and modeled in interfaith settings.
By the early 1980s, some developmental psychologists began to tease out the meaning of “competence” or “social competence” as related but separate from resilience. In “Social Competence as a Developmental Construct,” Everett Waters and L. Alan Sroufe define competence in a way particularly suited to our purposes. That is, they move from considering a person’s interior resources to thinking about what a person does. This action focus is helpful as we consider which capacities can be taught and fostered. Waters and Sroufe write, “Competence is viewed as an integrative concept which refers broadly to an ability to generate and coordinate flexible, adaptive responses to demands and to generate and capitalize on opportunities in the environment (i.e., effectiveness).”12 Competence in this form is easier to measure as a competency. That is, we can look for evidence of inner resilience, but it seems difficult to articulate as a learning outcome. In contrast, competence per Waters’s and Sroufe’s definition points us to looking for responses to concrete moments. One can imagine, in an interfaith setting, creating a microteaching opportunity
