Resilience and Efficacy in Urban Schools

Resilience pertains to a certain emotional ruggedness in individuals that allows them to persevere in the face of adversity. The term resilience connotes a state or condition of emotional strength, persistence, and perseverance of an individual under adverse conditions. This entry examines research on resilience and self-efficacy as it applies to students in urban schools.

Steven and Sandra Wolin characterize resilient individuals as those who are socially and emotionally hardy, invulnerable, and invincible. Michael Rutter characterizes resilience as a protective mechanism that modifies an individual's response to particular types of adversity (known as risk factors) so as to avert negative outcomes in the form of problematic behavior, social pathology, or psychopathology. Hence, Norman Garmezy and Ann Masten conclude that in addition to referring to a state of an individual, resilience may also refer to (a) the maintenance of healthy development despite the presence of a threat and (b) the eventual recovery from trauma.

Rutter's seminal work expanded the notion by theorizing the situated nature of resilience within one's own experiences, actions, and beliefs, and proposed that an individual's resilience was co-determined by environmental and individual factors. Among those individual factors that matter most in school performance is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers to an individual's belief in his or her ability to successfully determine a given outcome. It is the self-appraisal of one's capacity to bring about success in a given situation. A person's sense of efficacy may determine the degree to which risk factors can impact resilience as manifested, for example, in academic performance and educational attainment.

According to self-efficacy theory, there is a reciprocal relationship between students' beliefs about their capacity and the effort they put forth leading to achievement. When the effective effort put forth by students results in achievement, it elevates their sense of efficacy and, in turn, promotes resilience in the form of successful academic outcomes. This relationship between achievement and beliefs about one's own capability can also work in reverse: Students who lack confidence in their ability to achieve on school-related tasks diminish their effort and subsequently perform less well.

Resilience theory and self-efficacy theory are both applied to theorizing the conditions that promote educational resilience among children and youth in under-resourced urban settings who experience chronic emotional and social trauma. In recent years, research in urban education by scholars such as Prudence Carter, Claude Steele, and Beverly Tatum has systematically revealed the connection between resilience and academic success by examining how young people construct their [Page 1847]social identities as capable learners, especially when cultural stereotypes animated by racism are figured in as risk factors. This new work on educational resilience offers a nuanced understanding of social identity and the ways that racial and cultural identity are implicated as risk factors in the educational attainment of students of color.

A promising direction in theorizing educational resilience and academic perseverance among urban school-goers includes work by scholars such as Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard that studies developing resilience by creating processes of culturally, emotionally, and historically enriched social identification. Their work, along with that of Peter Murrell, has found that enriching the cultural environments for ethnic minority students may be just as important as eliminating the social risk factors they encounter, which helps to promote the development of identities of achievement—or resiliency in social identities as young scholars.

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