Abstract
This chapter builds upon but extends current understanding of resilience in teachers by exploring the nature of teacher resilience from a social-ecological perspective. The social-ecological understanding of resilience as an environment-centred, process-oriented latent concept enables us to place teachers in their complex worlds of work and analyse the ways in which their capacity to teach to their best influences and is influenced by their professional worlds. It argues that at a time when the contemporary landscape of teaching has become increasingly complex and diverse and when teachers’ professional worlds are populated with successive and persisting government policy reforms which have increased their external accountabilities, work complexity and emotional workload, understanding why and how many teachers are able to manage the complexity challenge, sustain their capacity to be resilient and continue to work for improvement is an important quality retention issue.
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Gu, Q. (2018). (Re)conceptualising Teacher Resilience: A Social-Ecological Approach to Understanding Teachers’ Professional Worlds. In: Wosnitza, M., Peixoto, F., Beltman, S., Mansfield, C.F. (eds) Resilience in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76690-4_2
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