Resilience Building and Social Reconstructionist Teaching: A First-Year Teacher's Story

Abstract

A white, middle-class, male fifth-grade teacher in his first year of teaching at a predominantly black, urban, poor public elementary school collaborated with a professor from his teacher education program to study his experience learning to teach. Committed to teaching children in poverty, the confident young teacher was determined to enact a social reconstructionist curriculum. Faced with strong student resistance to his practices, the teacher recognized the need to prepare his students to participate in the challenging and unfamiliar curriculum. We describe the teacher's efforts at building resilience and social reconstructionist teaching. The resilience-building curriculum enabled the students to move beyond the brand of domesticating education to which they had grown accustomed and toward a liberatory education of social critique and social action. In his first year of teaching, the teacher learned about the challenges of social reconstructionist teaching, the role of building resilience in the social reconstructionist classroom, and the meaning and importance of teacher resilience.