Teacher resilience: theorizing resilience and poverty

In this article, I hope to provide some novel insights into teacher resilience and poverty on the basis of ten-year long-term ethnographic participatory reflection and action data obtained from teachers (n?=?87) in rural (n?=?6) and urban (n?=?8) schools (n?=?14, high schools?=?4, primary schools?=?10) in three South African provinces. In resilience debates, resilience in poverty-saturated schools is generally indicated as both process and outcome. Evidence from this study posits resilience processes in poverty as a lifeline chain, linking uninterrupted incidences of adaptation one after the other. Thus, rather than once-off incidental processes depicting a clear adversity beginning and positive adaptation end, adapting to poverty calls for resilience qualities characterized as a cable of nonstop vigilance. To mediate risk during resilience processes, the teachers in the study made use of traits such as compassion, creativity, optimism and especially flocking to access and use scarce protective resources. In the lifeline chain of resilience, the teachers demonstrated mostly positive outcomes as well as instances of maladaptation and thriving. Teacher resilience in poverty contexts means that teachers ceaselessly adapt in a sequence of linked incidents to a procession of risks. They use particular traits to unite and direct their adaptive series of behaviors in order to transform high-risk schools into supportive spaces where they sometimes thrive, and sometimes feel distressed but mostly function effectively as teachers.