emotional practices, new habits, the time to take chances and try new ways of engaging, and time to build relationships. In the next section, relationship building particularly will be related to resilience; let us keep in mind that relationships also take time to build, another reason resilience to withstand new encounters is beneficial for longer-lasting inter-religious engagement.
Ingrid Schoon explores the idea of “adaptation” as a key part of resilience in her Risk and Resilience: Adaptations in Changing Times. Schoon is more interested in the “ordinary23 adaptive processes”24 as a dynamic, ongoing process than in what might inoculate an individual from the impact of her surroundings. For Schoon, adaptation is part of a life-long process and individuals are intimately connected through their relationships with others; both of these influence how and why one might be resilient in a given situation. As we review Schoon’s emphasis on inter-connectedness and the dynamic construction of life course, let us keep in mind possible features that might be mapped onto inter-religious education.
Schoon articulates five principles as part of the concept of “life-course” in competency; she enumerates the following:
1. Human development is a life-long process.
2. Individuals construct their own life course through choices and actions they take within the opportunities and constraints of history and social circumstances, a principle also referred to as human agency.
3. The life course is embedded and shaped by social structures and the historical times and places experienced by individuals over their lifetime.
4. The developmental antecedents and consequences of life transitions, events and behaviour [sic] patterns vary according to their timing in a person’s life.
5. Lives are lived interdependently, and social and historical influences bear on this network of linked lives.25
While these concepts are connected to resilience as understood by Garmezy, for example, we see that Schoon has definitively moved beyond thinking about flaws that need to be addressed, or disordered individuals that might be studied. Instead, she has moved into considering interdependent relationships and how these “networks of shared relationships”26 surround individual development. As Schoon puts it, “resilience is a multidimensional phenomenon.”27 All five of Schoon’s life-course aspects coordinate with the work of educators, and can be included in inter-religious pedagogy. Indeed, Schoon takes a kind of holistic approach to understanding how and when individuals are resilient, and how they can both learn from their own experiences and help teach others in their “network of linked lives.” This is the stuff of both religious education and inter-religious education. Is it possible to leverage this network to foster resilient practices? Are religious or inter-religious communities particularly suited to cultivating positive networks for this growth?
Pioneers in the area of resilience research barely mention religion as a factor in resilience. Occasionally, one will note that “religiousness” can provide an external resource for those suffering from illness or trauma, but it has been left relatively unexplored, particularly when compared to the field as a whole. In “Anchored by Faith: Religion as a Resilience Factor,” by Kenneth I. Pargament and Jeremy Cummings, the obstacles faced by those wishing to include religion are described in their survey of human resilience. They write,
In spite of the fact that the founding figures in psychology viewed religion as central to an understanding of human behavior, the field of psychology largely neglected religious issues for much of the 20th century. When religion was considered, it was often (1) viewed as a source of pathology, (2) measured by a few global religious items, and (3) explained in terms of purportedly more basic phenomena . . . The number of studies on religion has grown, and it has become clear through this research that religiousness can play a significant role in response to major life stressors.28
Pargament and Cummings assert “religiousness is a significant resilience factor for many people.”29 Pargament in particular has done much of the foundational research connecting religiousness and resilience, and he bemoans the fact that researchers have “neglected or diminished”30 the role of religion to this point. For a religious educator or practical theologian, though, Pargament and Cummings cover no new ground. They sum how prayer and membership in a religious community give comfort and even pain relief to the afflicted, can give a sense of meaning in the face of trauma, and they explain how some therapists (their examples are all Christian) use “psychospiritual interventions” to enhance their work with patients.31 Their final assertion, “religiousness can be a catalyst for positive life changes and stress-related growth,”32 is true enough, but they provide no road map for how religious or inter-religious educators might connect religious or ethical commitments and fostering resilience as a capacity for learning.
While reflective practice includes competencies that dovetail well with religious and inter-religious education, resilience as a possible competency fits less well. Limitations include: focus on the personal, to the exclusion of considering how resilience might be fostered in group settings like classrooms; focus on internal processes; and lack of research on how people might learn resilience practices.
And yet, challenges in life—and in the classroom—are normal, particularly when we move beyond shallow, more initial relationships and experiences into the turbulence that truer encounters can create. As we close this section, let us examine some possible connections between competence or resilience and the wider learning community that surrounds individuals. These connections are most likely to be fruitful for understanding how resilience might work as a capacity in inter-religious learning.
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