Abstract
With a high rate of attrition and burnout of teachers as a global concern, teacher resilience has become a trendy topic in the research of their professional development as one of the pillars of positive psychology (positive character traits). However, the literature reveals that little research has been done on the mid-career teachers in the Chinese context, especially on how resilience may be nurtured, sustained, or eroded over time. Focusing on a mid-career EFL female teacher (the author) in China as a case study, this longitudinal self-reflective study employs a narrative inquiry to investigate the challenges that the experienced teacher was encountered with and to depict her trajectories of resilience-building by fleshing out the interaction between challenges, resources, and coping strategies in her three different scenarios. “Hard data,” such as teaching journals, reflective field notes, and messages with students were collected and analyzed inductively by using thematic analysis, and “soft data,” like memory was also referred to. The findings unfolded challenges confronting the experienced teacher peculiar to the Chinese context and charted a detailed bumpy journey of resilience building in three phases, accompanied by her growing emotional, intellectual, and psychological capacities. Implications are drawn out for teacher resilience building, school leaders, and policymakers.
Highlights
A body of research has proved that teaching has become one of the most demanding and stressful professions in any field in the 21st century (Travers and Cooper, 1996; Nash, 2005; Gu and Day, 2007; Derakhshan et al, 2020a)
By providing a thick description of the case and a close analysis of the narrative, the current study aims to document the complexity of the resilience-building journey and to deepen our understanding of the challenges confronting the experienced teacher in particular (Xie and Derakhshan, 2021)
The themes concerning the resilience-building process are stated on terms of challenges, resources, and response and strategies in the three phases: (1) homeostasis-breaking and changes-resisting, (2) reflecting, recognizing, and rebuilding, and (3) assimilating and adapting
Summary
A body of research has proved that teaching has become one of the most demanding and stressful professions in any field in the 21st century (Travers and Cooper, 1996; Nash, 2005; Gu and Day, 2007; Derakhshan et al, 2020a). Resilience research in SLA is a recent area of investigation in the positive psychology shift (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; MacIntyre and Mercer, 2014; MacIntyre et al, 2016; Budzińska and Majchrzak, 2021; Wang et al, 2021). It has been illuminated by the resilience theories in the field of psychology including Resiliency Model of Richardson et al (1990), and the broaden-and-build theory. As a nascent area, resilience studies in SLA have documented abundant effective strategies to foster and maintain teachers’ motivation and commitment in the context of Britain (Gu and Day, 2007, 2013; Greenier et al, 2021), Australia (Mansfield et al, 2014; Mansfield, 2021), America (Mansfield, 2021), and Iran (Derakhshan et al, 2020b)
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