It’s not always clear what resilience means.
Too often the focus is on the individual in isolation, where in fact resilience is a complex, and broad, concept that encompasses the individual, their social network, and their environment.
Our recent scoping review offers clarification on the conceptualization of student resilience in higher education, defining it as:
a dynamic process of positive adaptation in the face of adversity or challenge. This process involves the capacity to negotiate for, and draw upon, psychological, social, cultural, and environmental resources” .
This highlights the role resilience plays in enabling students to adapt successfully to periods of adversity, and ideally, allowing students to not only survive these periods, but to grow, learn and further develop skills and resilience into the future.
