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How and what culture looks like differs across university contexts and domains.

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Resilience is important, because the world is unforgiving. So we should prepare students for this - however, we also need to be aware that by doing so, we are not setting high expectations for these students to the point they are unable to be met.

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It was striking in our conversation to see some sticking points around the deep connection of socio-economic issues as they directly impact the education system. In the USA, redlining, segregation, and oppressive forces drive divisions between schools and make education a social justice issue.

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Historical and cultural difference exists between Grit and Resilience, particularly when thinking about social justice movements in the United States. Resilience is not seen in a deficit-based way but in fact the opposite: resilience is, as adrienne maree brown defines it, "the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties," a positive quality that will help combat hopelessness and create continued opportunities to fight oppression. http://adriennemareebrown.net/2016/11/09/a-range-of-reflections-on-resilience/

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At my university in the U.K. it is much a discourse of the faculty not accepting to do any sort of self criticism and blaming the students instead: for example they never question their teaching style and when students complain the content delivered is too much at the point of making them mentally ill they blame it on their lack of study skills or resilience

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As a mentor and teacher, I find that it’s about finding a balance along the spectrum of encouraging personal responsibility (grit) and offering care and support. There is always a mix of both, but every student and case might fall along the spectrum in difference places. Sometimes I doubt the process and whether I made a mistake in either way.  It’s messy, but I enjoy it and love mentoring.

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What are your experiences and your concerns with "resilience"? 

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What are your experiences and your concerns with "resilience"? 

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Often we see and view adolescents in deficit. The book The Good Teen by Richard Lerner addresses this. I have a feeling this narrative of grit is of similar model. I agree with the notion that the resilience P.O.V puts the onus on the individual and mitigates the responsibility of others and systems. Also reminds me of the "bandwagon" of terms and ideas/pedagogies that are clutched upon by institutions but are yet to be effectively integrated. How can we encourage all stakeholders accountable to slowing down and thinking through their words/values/actions?

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Have you come across ideas that you should get students ready for a harsh world? Or that you can 'make stress your friend'?

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Have you come across ideas that you should get students ready for a harsh world? Or that you can 'make stress your friend'?

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What is the overlap with ideas of 'character education'?

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What is the overlap with ideas of 'character education'?

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Should we see it as our job to make students 'tougher'?

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I’ve just realised that we didn’t talk about whether peer mentoring can have a positive impact in this

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Really important I think, exposing and immersing individuals into a range of experiences, that will also lead to failure and finding ways through it, really important, I think. A homogenous always successful string of experiences highly problematic...

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Modelling vulnerability and learning.

Taking real life examples into academia - helping students to experience challenge, failure and go through or change direction - problem based learning.

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Pedagogic responses? We need to be teaching change skills - not just how to change your self but the wider structural and professional change. And we should learn them ourselves so we can model this in practice and assess them on the ability to bring change...

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Pedagogic responses? We need to be teaching change skills - not just how to change your self but the wider structural and professional change. And we should learn them ourselves so we can model this in practice and assess them on the ability to bring change...

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Is the “real” world really so different now?

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Sounds like the Dunning Krueger effect is still in full evidence in over confidence

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How adversity often leaves us vulnerable to resilience discourses? A personal account... 

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How adversity often leaves us vulnerable to resilience discourses? A personal account... 

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Making sense of personal experience is hard. When it isn't hard, I fear self-serving simplifications, even when such narratives cast us in an unflattering light. Traumatic events in our lives operate below the surface, like the riptide that drags you away from the course you're sure you are navigating. You can put a rudder at an angle to match the pull on your sea-kayak, to run true to your intentions. In trying to see how life-events drag you, some form of self-examination - unpleasant though that is to many raised in a peculiarly buttoned-up English culture, layered with conventional ideas of masculinity - can aspire to fulfilling an analogous purpose. Like the sea-kayak's rudder, this is not a permanent or guaranteed solution: it needs ongoing monitoring and work. In many contexts, this is the work that people undertake with a therapist, as psychoanalytic work seeks to strip back those self-serving narratives ¹, and ready us to see what tides are really pulling us, often again and again, to the rocks on which we find our lives crashing.

But therapy is not the only way. Here I draw from my own halting attempts at understanding specific events in my own experience, and locating connections to a set of wider cultural discourses, which, despite my background as a philosopher and religious studies scholar, has lead me to engage with the reflective process of auto-ethnography. In Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject, ² Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner assuage concerns about only capturing a partial picture, and bias, by reminding us of how arrogant it might be to imagine we do some kind of academic work that wasn't partial, and didn't to some extent include the actors and author. They say it in conversation, and they say it well. These are hard words to heed for those of us who were trained to think of good academic work as that in which the author and their views are invisible. Nonetheless, in any human, discursive discipline, we are not wrong to be highly suspicious of what Judith Butler calls: "the postures of indifference and dispassion which have in various modalities conditioned philosophical thinking." ³ If we need further reassurance of the disingenuous inauthenticity of those who sneer at the appearance of the personal, at the value of an openly situated epistemic position ⁴, we can also remind ourselves of paragraph 5 of Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil:

they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched on. They pose as having discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic (bracketed section on mystics omitted) : while what happens at the bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an 'inspiration', generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event - they are one and all advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptize 'truths'.

Rather than basing my piece on interviews and field notes then, like a good sociologist might, I want to revisit something I wrote in August 2016, based on events in 2012 and 2013. The blog post was Getting High in the Low Countries ⁵. As friends will recognise, more than I did at the time, I was trying to put my most serious life-event of recent years under a jokey title that let me hide my anxiety in plain sight. In the blog, I thread the story of my stroke in 2012 with an account of the fundraising climb I did in 2013. The primary conceptual reflection in the piece related to, but didn't name, a sense of vulnerability. The reflexive arc, such as it is, in the piece begins with hoping to use the sponsored ascent as a full-stop, a way of saying "phew, that was scary but now I can move on with life." The heart consultant in Oxford, who supervised my procedure to limit further risks said, in my final meeting with him to "go away, forget the device is there, and the whole business". He is a world-renowned heart doctor, but he isn't much of a head doctor. The arc ended with a reflection, as we travelled back from climb, that life doesn't deal in summative punctuation:

The climb was memorable because it was a trip, a spectacle, a dramatic event, but I was wrong to think of it as a something I could use to close off, to bracket out, the fear and loss of control that my illness had brought me. As we sat on trains and planes back to the UK, and the adrenaline faded, I was struck that safety is only ever relative. The unpredictability of life is neither intrinsically good nor bad, but the inevitability of change, of the mutability of what we take as stable is something we'd be wise to acknowledge, before it leaves us dizzy with vertigo, while stood on solid ground. I've heard it said that old age is no place for wimps, but it seems middle-age can also be pretty hazardous terrain.

No full stops. Thinking back to writing the piece, and how the end emerged, I have consulted my drafts for the piece (back up all your data - you never know when you might want an old draft on an old article). The idea of the piece being about sitting with a sense of unsafety, being comfortable with an emergent awareness of the inevitability of change, was not in the early drafts. My memory now, traitorous though memory often is, is that it was an idea that emerged as I tried to make sense of where the writing was headed.

What I can see now, and what I don't seem to have realised at the time is, how much I was channelling my scholarly background. My doctoral work was on Buddhism as represented philosophically by the Pali Canon. Meditating on, and learning to cope with, what the texts call anicca is central. Anicca is often rendered as 'impermanence', in the sense that nothing persists indefinitely, or without change. As we find in the Alagaddupama Sutta, ⁶ all phenomena, all that exists, is in flux:

You may well take hold of a possession, O monks, that is permanent, stable, eternal, immutable, that abides eternally the same in its very condition. (But) do you see, monks, any such possession?" - "No, Lord." - "Well, monks, I, too, do not see any such possession that is permanent, stable, eternal, immutable, that abides eternally the same in its very condition.

When I wrote the blog about my stroke, I had been working on these texts for over a decade. I now wonder if my throwaway lines about learning to live with change were almost like a reflex. An arrogance. Of course, the riptides were more complex and treacherous, and that the cost of seeing anicca in reality was a sense of exposure; a sense of vulnerability. What I didn't see then, was the way that psychological adaptation to change wasn't the thing, it was ongoing change in my psychological adaptation that was the thing; the one that would catch me unawares. This resonates with some recent work I've been involved in, related to ideas of resilience and vulnerability.

With that in mind, I want to flag just how overpoweringly alluring the narrative of resilience and grit was to me, during my recovery. Since my mid-life induced, only-partly-ineffective-mortality-awareness-avoidance rituals of exercise started in my late 30s, I have read stories of grit. Running literature, and sports literature more widely, is awash with stories of using sport to 'bounce back' from trauma, adversity and anything else you care to mention. In distance running, for example, you really do, learn to be more comfortable with moderate physical discomfort than middle-aged male academics are often exposed to in the rest of their lives. But thinking this makes us especially well prepared to respond to medical frights/experiences seems spectacularly muddle headed. Our lack of physical discomfort is not the norm, anyway, but a function of privilege. Manual jobs involve tolerating this kind of thing all the time. Many women experience substantial regular physical discomfort during menstruation. People who live with (dis)abilities or chronic pain will be all too familiar with discomfort, at the very least. So, let us not overly lionise the familiarity with physical challenge that certain kinds of exercise gives. It doesn't make one uniquely placed to 'push on through', 'bounce-back', or [insert cliché here].

In addressing these seductive narratives, a further risk is that I might sense that my academic privilege is like an immunisation against buying into too much self-deluding bullshit. Yet that kind of thinking, of believing you stand outside the material you write about, as already alluded to with reference to Butler and Nietzsche, is when you really lie to yourself - when you become your own worst enemy.

Thinking more about how we then navigate this pull, this nagging tide, which drives us towards a self-aggrandising narrative that I bounced back, and was somehow superlatively and heroically resilient, is important. What makes it hard though is that well-meaning people frequently tell us how resilient we are, or how impressed they are with our ability to bounce back, and it feels good. After the shock of having our illusions of self-determination wrenched away by illness, it gives us a little of that back. A little of it may be a good thing, may help us stabilise our tilting kayak, but like so much that satisfies us, it can be hard to see that a lot of it is not good. It is problematic in that it implies that those who didn't recover as well, or as quickly, or go and run a sponsored marathon, just didn't try hard enough, or don't have the 'right' kind of character reserves. If we fall for the "if I can do it, anyone can" line, we really blind ourselves to the reality that many, actually, can't, and we can't ever be privy to the full suite of reasons why that might be the case, and we might want to tone down the all-conquering hero narrative, before someone sees through it anyway.

Another reason to hold off on the resilience discourse, and our buying into it, is that our perception changes. We may feel gritty and tough as we stride across a finish line, cheered on and hoping to have left our troubles behind us, but vulnerability isn't as simple as that. In 2014, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score recounted the way trauma survivors are affected by their experiences, and how we as a society might find better ways of treating them. It is a challenging book, and the trauma suffered by those he works with dwarfs what I, or I suspect many readers, can even imagine. My medical misadventures are removed by orders of magnitude from the torture victims and neglected children he writes about; but the title gives us a clue to his powerful central thesis. The reality of what has happened to people will not be denied by them figuratively dusting off their hands, and thinking that some arbitrary activity is the end of it. I may have felt that I had adapted to change, taken more seriously some Buddhist ideas, and moved on, when I closed that blog post. I was wrong.

I get a sense that much resilience discourse operates conceptually with a hard barrier between 'me' and the 'world' that I have to navigate, like naïve Cartesian dualists. But 'the body is keeping the score', and whether we choose David Hume, or Buddhist ideas of [not-self], we should resist the easy idea that 'we' are a stable, hard-bordered reality. Who I am/was is always a shifting thing, as I change over time, but any kind of drastic, or unexpected, experience represents, whether we discern the process or not, a quickening of this. The person I became doesn't choose to feel vulnerable, or fail to be resilient enough. What began to crack through my sense of having 'put away' this episode was the way it was inscribed into me. My sense of vulnerability didn't feel, for some time, as a phenomenon that I would name as 'vulnerability'. It manifests as slightly (or more honestly, very) over-anxious attention to health symptoms, into a dread fear of not 'doing things' (whatever form that might take), and into a discomfort with, and inability to fully enjoy doing nothing. ⁷ My agency then is not in choosing whether or not to 'man up' to my experiences and face them down. The body and brain isn't scared of the laughable posturing of my masculinity. My agency is, I guess, both limited and reactive. I probably need to have been open and honest about feelings. Growing up as a boy in the 1970s didn't leave me spectacularly well equipped to even admit that I had feelings, of course, as our broader culture conspired to remind us that boys didn't cry, or feel. Well, as I am writing this for a public post, on the open wild-west of the internet, I might be getting over that a little. It has only taken almost 50 years.

What I am not trying to do here is to claim that my health experiences gave me any special insight; there was no halting epiphany, and I remain as suspicious as ever of the narrative of transformative sudden awakenings. As I age, ever more friends have had 'cardiac incidents', oncology experiences, losses, and traumas of their own; the idea that these are inherently instructive doesn't seem persuasive. Everything can be learnt from, but I am not so inspired by the inspirational posters of Tumblr to believe that life teaches us anything at all. And yet, although we may be tempted to see our academic work as placing us outside the narratives we critique, there is also a temptation to believe that just because we don't share an approach to understanding our experiences in a certain way, such framings are to be sneered at, or disregarded entirely. There are good reasons why some find 'grit' narratives useful in coping with life, and as such it seems crucial that when we engage in critiquing such narratives, which both offer reassurance yet serve to reinforce neoliberal understandings of the self, we need to retain a level of generosity to the ways in which we all try and make sense of our unfolding lives. I have also sought to steer away from this veering into becoming an overly self-indulgent exercise in narcissism ⁸, but I'm not best placed to judge the extent of my success. Nonetheless, what I have tried to outline is how the ongoing ambush of my expectations by reality, can at least be profitably refracted into trying make sense of the social relations that such mediations always end in.

1. As a young philosophy student, I first began to make sense of how we find explanatory mechanisms for our problems, which seem plausible but mask deeper causes of which we are faintly, or less faintly, aware, but ashamed to admit to ourselves and/or others, through the Jean-Paul Sartre play Huis Clos (No Exit).

2. Ellis, Carolyn & Bochner, Arthur. (2000). Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject. Handbook of Qualitative Research.

3. Butler, Judith, Subjects of Desire. p.1.

4. The notion of 'standpoint' in feminist writings on epistemology is explored by, amongst others, the late Professor Pamela Sue Anderson who uses it in her work on feminist philosophy of religion.

5. Originally posted on the climbing blog Holdbreaker at https://www.holdbreaker.com/blogs/news/short-climbing-story-3 - though I link in the main text to my repost, as this blog seems to have intermittent availability.

6. Sutta 22 of the Majjhima Nikaya collection. The quote is verse 22. The whole sutta is at https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.022.nypo.html

7. This was a skill that in my early 20s I excelled at.

8. I'll save that for Instagram.

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Vulnerability, Resilience and the Wild Seas of Auto-Ethnography: A Personal Reflection.

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Making sense of personal experience is hard. When it isn't hard, I fear self-serving simplifications, even when such narratives cast us in an unflattering light. Traumatic events in our lives operate below the surface, like the riptide that drags you away from the course you're sure you are navigating.

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It’s seems that resilience has become a panacea for all ills.

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Part of the insidious nature of these words is that they are fuzzy notions that people are nonetheless held to as standards.

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I wonder if their is a link between perfectionism and lower levels on individual self-efficacy
The pressures placed on students by the programme structure puts students at risk of failure

Practice and university demands placed on students undertaking professional programmes such as Midwifery is unacceptable in the modern age

Culture in universities and society compounds the problem

How might these notion impact on teaching?

More handholding to try and reduce any negative impact of the programme or culture only compounds the problem

I’m personally resist this strategy but other members of my team appear to use this a default position
Mixed messages do not help students understand when to act alone and when they might need guidance
Question 2

Do not spend sufficient time on having these types of conversations with students throughout the programme. Left to personal tutors on the whole

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Family relationships and social pressure

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Family relationships and social pressure

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The majority of the students who experience difficulties I advise do not want to share their struggles with their families. They'd don't want their parents to know that they are on antidepressants. This puts me in a different position as I sometimes feel that I'm expected to be a surrogate dad. Students don't want to be a "disappointment" to their parents, which is saddening. (I still share my problems and seek advice from my folks, and I'm 43).
Somet students shouldn't be pushed to enrol in HE if they don't want to be there (and some truly don't want to be the). Developing resilience is part of HEIs' strategies to improve retention metrics, in whichever way you do it. The most important ad fundamental question is: is University right for you?

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I get very cross that there are colleagues in HE who criticise students for being students; for being 18-19-20++ , for having full lives, for being busy, for caring, for being distracted by multiple screens, for being weak and for relying on support systems; and they simply cannot see how WE have contributed to this; they cannot or will not see any of the benefits or any of the skills that younger Gen Y and older Gen Z have and how the ideas they have will change the world, in the face of global, financial and cultural adversity. The stress and pressure on that group is unprecedented.

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Do you use Padlet in your teaching? If so how well used is it?

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https://davewebster.org/?s=resilience

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Post inspired by last year's ANTF event...

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Sat at the Association of National Teaching Fellows one-day event in sunny Birmingham, I found myself engaging in passive-aggressive tweeting about bloody 'resilience'. On my return, I complained about my disquiet with the way the term, and what it has come to stand for, have become pervasive in some parts of education. With great relief, I discovered that my office-mate Dr Nicola Rivers, shares some of my views. Out of our conversation, we have tried to capture the core of what, in a Higher Education context, is so problematic about the narratives on resilience, grit, Millennials, 'snowflakes' and 'academic buoyancy' that seem so omnipresent.

There are things we leave out, such as the place of Mindfulness practice, discussions around 'trigger warnings', and free-speech on campus; and we hope to write a fuller version of this post, which includes them, possibly for publication elsewhere, but this is an initial 'take' on what happens to a concept when everyone thinks it's a good idea...

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Resisting Resilience, and other unpopular opinions

Everywhere you look in Higher Education, we are told that an attribute we ought to cultivate in our students (or act so as to encourage the cultivation of), is that of resilience. You can find toolkits for it, and articles asserting its decline. In the latter we encounter the claim that: "students' emotional fragility has become a serious problem" ( Psychology Today, Sept 2015), but no data, only anecdotes about students who can't cope with criticism, or mice, or life in general. Some are more engaged with the complexity of student mental health, and the cultural setting such as the project: Stanford, I Screwed Up! A Celebration of Failure and Resilience, but the general cultural drift they represent makes us uncomfortable, and we hope to show why it should make you uncomfortable too.

But surely we are wrong? There is no question that students now are facing substantial challenges, related to precarious employment contacts, housing and career prospects. There are many claiming, that we are facing a global mental-health epidemic (notable in relation to anxiety disorders)in young people. We have, you'd think, a moral duty to equip students with the best resources to deal with the harsh challenges of the real world. To a degree, that is persuasive, and I think all of us working in the University sector want to help our students cope, thrive and attain once they leave us. Of course. We are not monsters. But borne out of a concern for the welfare of students, having seen cohort after cohort of bright, amazing, interesting and intelligent young people pass from our tutelage into the world beyond, is the very worry that an overly crass, ubiquitous and uncritical narrative of 'they need to be more resilient/tougher/less soft' does them no favours, and at worst can feed into a more toxic cultural discourse that regards our current generation/s of young people as 'snowflakes', who are easily 'triggered', thereby slipping into the discourse of a cultural right-wing that many educators might rather steer clear of.

So, while seeing that in the case of individual students, resilience may be something that helps them, what do we mean by our broader concerns about its impact? What do we have in mind? We could well describe the 'resilience response' to substantive socio-economic instability as deeply neoliberal. We are aware that ' neoliberal' is often considered empty and overused, so let us be clear here. In this context, we are interested in the wider cultural frame whereby the solution to problems, seen via primarily viewing persons as consumers, is presented through the case of individuals. Although seemingly benign then, the idea of instilling resilience in our students works to reinforce the facade of a meritocracy, suggesting the 'best' or most 'resilient' will succeed, while those who lack resilience will fail. Not only is this totally disingenuous - particularly for those of us working in the Humanities and Social Sciences whose own research frequently seeks to disrupt such basic neoliberal narratives - it also works to shift the focus from challenging the multiple social and structural barriers students may face, to instead suggesting the only barrier to success is the students themselves. What is then presented as an unequivocally good thing - to be resilient - is actually offering another way to fail, another way to be blamed. The relentless turn to individualism, and thinking individuals can solve their problems if only they'd do X (with one quick trick, as the click-bait article says), blinds us to ways of thinking about, or example, anxiety in ways that might have more efficacy in our communal response.

The language of 'resilience,' 'grit' and the insidious 'Growth Mindset' flatten out the complexities of success or failure as well as the apparently personal attributes that influence either outcome. As Alfie Kohn argues addressing the possible pitfalls of the unquestioning promotion of the ' growth mindset' sweeping across classrooms, when talking about how 'well' students do, we need to ask, how well at what? When we work to promote persistence, grit and resilience we assume that the worse thing in the world is to quit, but why? What about when quitting is the only reasonable course of action; and isn't there a subtle but important difference between quitting and giving up that the language of grit and resilience rides roughshod over? In fact, it can take grit to know when to say no, enough is enough.

Students face huge debt and there are too few graduate jobs, yet when you discuss the issue of 'employability'* - as academics are now (robustly) encouraged to do - frequently there is a citing of the importance of resilience and a 'can do' attitude, rather than say, a buoyant economy, or the availability of jobs for them to even apply to. The focus of employability then becomes 'Let us make our students the ones who will defeat their students, by stacking them full of the attributes of the few winners.' We are equipping them to compete for unpaid internships that profit from their precariousness and participate in the unequal ' gig economy' rather than critique it. Systemic conversations about communal problems are eclipsed by the need to intervene individually. The message is "fix yourself and the wider social issues will somehow take care of themselves."

We are not alone** in some of these concerns, in a piece by Gabbi Binnie, entitled Struggling students are not 'lacking resilience' - they need more support, the author writes:

I have been working as a welfare officer for the past year, and I have rarely seen the term used to encourage self-improvement in an effective way. I have seen students told by their tutors, counsellors and other support staff that they just need to become more resilient. Yet there is little advice on how to do this, or why it will help. Students often see the word as a synonym for strength, and therefore feel that lacking resilience is a sign of weakness. A professor could be saying "be more resilient" and mean that a student shouldn't take critical comments on their work personally. But what a student hears is something like, you aren't strong enough, or you need to man-up, or you lack backbone.

This is interesting, and seems to concur with the popular register of the term. There is a more nuanced account in much literature, but when students hear it - they hear it in a context. A context where they are derided as somehow lacking in relation to previous generations - and one aspect of this lack is in 'toughness'.

Our wider culture bombards us, and our students, with this view that they are 'soft', lack 'grit' and have somehow 'let us all down' (how often have you heard a comfortable, middle-aged, employed graduate complain that students are apathetic?). Not convinced? If we turn to writer, and twitter-user Luke Savage, he gathered a list of the things that articles assert Millennials have ruined. These include sex, groceries, soap, literature, breakfast cereal, diamonds, names, workplaces, privacy, lunch, and more..

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But more seriously, rather than support students to challenge this view of them as 'soft' and oversensitive, the focus on resilience perpetuates this stereotype. While so-called 'millennials' are frequently derided for being self-obsessed - evident through their apparently narcissistic use of social media and embrace of the 'selfie' - those of us in a position to encourage students to look beyond themselves are covertly reinstating the overarching importance of the individual. Worst still, it is when students do actively engage in broader socio-political activism, abandoning the apparent 'navel gazing' they are so derided for, that they are most frequently positioned as oversensitive 'snowflakes' seeking offence when there is none. We are not alone in noticing this, but it remains as pervasive as it is problematic. In our 'post-race' and 'post-feminist' society, the issues they raise are assumed as having been dealt with by previous generations. To paraphrase Sara Ahmed, students aren't drawing attention to problems, they are the problem.

In short they are lacking 'resilience.' Resilience then plays into a wider and well-established framework, pitting generations against each other, with 'generation rent' apparently looking up enviously at the home owning so-called 'baby boomers,' who in turn sneer at the self-obsessed 'snowflakes' for failing to possess the resilience or grit of previous generations.

As we put these thoughts together, we also spotted a bunch of dangerous extreme radical thinkers also taking a sceptical stance towards 'resilience', on the hashtag #resistingresilience on twitter. That is, librarians. At the ACRL17 event, Angela Galvan, Jacob Berg, and Eamon Tewell presented a paper on Resilience, Grit and Other Lies. Some of the slides are below, but their concerns seem to echo our worries.

We are not calling for a moratorium on all uses of resilience, in all contexts. We are not complete idiots. We want our students to develop the attributes that make them employable, successful and happy; but is this narrative of resilience really going to make a contribution here? In a recent conversation one of us had with linguist, Tony Thorne, he remarked "Where is the proof that Generations Y/Z are really less resilient? They are subject to much more insidious and pervasive pressure (trolling, shaming, peer-pressure, manipulation by commerce, etc.) because of the digital environment they inhabit."

What we want and need are better ways of thinking about our students, not so mired in such individualist tropes. Some University teaching has moved on to a more collaborative model (obviously not all,) so surely our broader student development model needs to keep pace. The resilience model of students sees them in perpetual lack: at fault. This is neither healthy nor accurate. Instead, we need to be open to broader ways of engaging students, of thinking about their lives, what levers they really have to effect change, and where we, the rest of us, might have some responsibility in having fashioned the world (and its occupants) which has come to pass.

*The authors are not against employability. Both having had experience of unemployment, and are acutely aware that students will be facing realities where they need to demonstrate their employability. Our reluctance to be gung-ho advocates of resilience is also drawn from a need to be open about the current economic environment and the opportunities available. Even if a student has the right attitude, mindset and toughness, this is no guarantee of success. Further, having "the right attitude, mindset and toughness" is not an authentic set of tangible outcomes to demonstrate to an employer. They are not like, say, actual skills.

**Also see this interview with Dr Robin James: https://philosvids.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/resilience-melancholy-talking-to-dr-robin-james-about-her-new-book/

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Critiquing Discourses of Resilience in Education

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Sat at the Association of National Teaching Fellows one-day event in sunny Birmingham, I found myself engaging in passive-aggressive tweeting about bloody 'resilience'. On my return, I complained about my disquiet with the way the term, and what it has come to stand for, have become pervasive in some parts of education.