Resilience In Education

Eduardo Castillo

3/3/16

Title Community colleges play an important role in providing students access to higher education, and serve as an entryway of opportunity for many minority students (Boswell, 2004; Suarez, 2003; Trujillo & Diaz, 1999). Latinos currently account for 12.5% of the U.S. population and are the fastest growing component of the population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2001). Community colleges enroll approximately 50% of Latino students in higher education, a number that continues to grow each year (Fry, 2002; Suarez, 2003). Scholars report that Latinos are more likely than any other racial or ethnic group to enroll in community colleges (Fry, 2002; Kurlaender, 2006; Martinez & Fernández, 2004; Suarez, 2003). These demographics show

168). He explains that studies from this area identify individuals who experience severe stress such as poverty or substance abuse and then examine how they achieve success despite these circumstances. This knowledge has provided the framework for the study of educational resilience. Wang, Haertel, and Walberg (1994) explain that educational resilience focuses on the success of those individuals who experience personal hardship caused by environmental conditions. The community college students chosen for this study are educationally resilient because they are in the process of obtaining their college degrees despite the difficult circumstances that they face on a daily basis. For most of these participants, every day is a struggle, and yet they continue to beat the odds. Researchers who study educational resilience note that these community college students travel on a journey that is marked by protective factors (Benard, 2004; Morales, 2000). These factors, which are often divided into personal and environmental categories, protect the students against the adverse conditions that they face on a daily basis (Morales, 2000; Wayman,

First, it tends to place the responsibility of achieving success primarily on the effort of the individual without considering the cultural, economic, historical, and political contexts of schooling. This implies that students who drop out of school simply chose to do so, thus relieving educational institutions of responsibility. This leaves the dynamics of power embedded in these schooling systems unexamined. Second, this perspective presents the attributes that contribute to resilience as static: Individuals either have these or they do not. However, this is not the case, because these attributes are fluid and negotiated throughout one’s life, vary from individual to individual, and are influenced by cultural values and circumstances. In other words, there is complexity in meaning and coherence in individuals’ experiences (Calderon, 1998). Reese, Kroesen, and Gallimore (2000) note that personal attributes are better understood when situated within a sociocultural context because their resilience is then a combination of “both product and process” (p.