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explain divergent paths to adaptation or to deviance.”6 This “variability in outcomes”7 led to Garmezy’s consideration of development from the end (either the traumatized and not flourishing, or traumatized and still flourishing) child, to try and determine what had justified that outcome. This was a new lens with which to consider the outcome—previously, researchers (including Garmezy) had begun with the starting situation or traumas (poverty, illness, sick mother, low IQ). Garmezy marks this new lens and the meaning for how researchers saw children within the context of his outcomes as he writes,

      Provide us with a slum child who is forging a pattern of strength and we will cast about for environmental surrogates who must have served as inoculators against despair, for events that must have encouraged hope rather than hopelessness, for inner resources that must have proclaimed vitality rather than helplessness. However, were we to convert this same slum child into someone prone to violence or aberration, our focus would be turned with equal efficiency and perhaps even greater facility to alternate figures and facets that would buttress our perception of deviance.8

      Note that even Garmezy’s verb “inoculate” suggests the idea that something external, when applied to a child, can foster healing and strength. Instead, what Garmezy and his peers find is that the strength is already present within some children and adults.

      How does this relate to possibilities for inter-religious education? When we examine engagement in inter-religious settings, we will find that some participants are able to withstand the disruption and dissonance of alterity better than others. And yet, learning cannot take place if participants abandon the project as soon as they feel uncomfortable. One task of inter-religious educators and facilitators is to create containers and methods to foster a kind of in-the-moment resiliency in students, so that they might draw upon interior and even external resources (their relationship with peers, support from the instructor, the required nature of a course as extrinsic motivation) to remain participants.

      Just as reflective practice ought to be the focus of educational activities, especially in inter-religious settings, so too can resilience be included in models and practices that can be taught and fostered. Although Garmezy made this move in 1970, it is still infrequently included in stated capacities for inter-religious learning, or even religious or multi-cultural learning. Garmezy’s early questions provide some ideas for qualities we can examine in this project. He writes,

      Can we use our schools and clinics as centers for training these [high-risk] children in more adaptive techniques for coping? Can we use participation in successful play to increase the flexibility of the response repertoires of these children? Can we stimulate adaptive behavior by introducing into such training centers healthy children who can serve as models for the vulnerable child?9

      We might well ask the following questions: Can we use our spaces of inter-religious encounter as centers for training students in more adaptive techniques for prolonged engagement with others? Can we use participation in study groups and microteaching to increase the flexibility of response repertoires of these students? Can we stimulate practice in withstanding disruption by introducing models for successful relationship and engagement?

      In this chapter, we will explore major themes in resilience research and discover which features might be salient for religious-and inter-religious education. All three strands of our understanding of resilience—competence, coping, and community—offer something that we might glean for inter-religious education.

      Even after Garmezy made the initial move from focusing on the negative to examining what might “inoculate” some children against trauma, researchers still tracked the negative attributes of children’s surroundings and circumstances. However, once researchers moved to considering the development of “competence,” some positive attributes came into focus. Ingrid Schoon, in her book Risk and Resilience: Adaptations in Changing Times, identifies the pitfall in focusing on the negative, and demonstrates how far the field had come by 2006. Schoon argues, “A focus on resilience and resources, on the other hand, aims to understand adaptive development in spite of risk exposure and to maximise [sic] wellness even before maladjustment has occurred,”10 and underscores her point, writing, “the resilience framework entails emphasis not on deficits but on areas of strength.”11 As we shall see, once researchers began considering areas of strength as well as deficit, and examined “understanding adaptive development” as part of a wider interpersonal matrix, the field began to include capacities that can be isolated, taught, developed, and modeled in interfaith settings.

      By the early 1980s, some developmental psychologists began to tease out the meaning of “competence” or “social competence” as related but separate from resilience. In “Social Competence as a Developmental Construct,” Everett Waters and L. Alan Sroufe define competence in a way particularly suited to our purposes. That is, they move from considering a person’s interior resources to thinking about what a person does. This action focus is helpful as we consider which capacities can be taught and fostered. Waters and Sroufe write, “Competence is viewed as an integrative concept which refers broadly to an ability to generate and coordinate flexible, adaptive responses to demands and to generate and capitalize on opportunities in the environment (i.e., effectiveness).”12 Competence in this form is easier to measure as a competency. That is, we can look for evidence of inner resilience, but it seems difficult to articulate as a learning outcome. In contrast, competence per Waters’s and Sroufe’s definition points us to looking for responses to concrete moments. One can imagine, in an interfaith setting, creating a microteaching opportunity to engage in a disruptive idea—the use of case studies comes to mind as one potential example. After the initial lesson, time for reflection can be expanded to include questions like, “What was your initial impression?”; “What was your process for working through the dilemma?”; “Did your ideas change during the encounter?”; and “What resources (prior experiences or knowledge, modelling by instructor or peers, relationship) helped you work through the experience?”

      We notice that these are questions of reflection; indeed, the reflection and resilience are related. If we consider reflection to be a flexible, responsive action-in-practice, this concept meets another part of Waters’s and Sroufe’s articulation of competence. They continue, writing, “Competence . . . is identified with the ability to mobilize and coordinate these resources in such a way that opportunities are created and the potentials or resources in the environment are realized; again, for a good developmental outcome.”13 This idea of “coordination” reminds us of metaphors used to describe artists or jazz musicians. In addition, coordination itself is a practice. That is, students can identify the components of coordination (identifying resources, applying ideas, evaluating their success, reflecting on the outcome), practice them, and share their practice with others.

      Coordination is also a positive attribute (in the sense that it is a skill one possesses, unlike precursor ideas of resiliency that sought to describe how a person should have been failing to thrive, given the conditions surrounding them) in addition to being a practice. In “IQ and Ego-Resiliency: Conceptual and Empirical Connections and Separateness,” Jack Block and Adam M. Kremen note both that competence is a practice and that it is also rooted in outward engagement with others. First, Block and Kremen write, “Within a single life, too, it will be observed that at times a person is much more resourceful and adaptively effective than at other times.”14 With this in mind, we move from the idea of “an invulnerable person” whose resilience allows her to overcome all manner of obstacles to the sense that all of us are more or less resourceful and adaptive at different points. This is good news for those of us who would seek to develop resilience as a capacity in education. Similarly, we find another part of the capacity that can be taught in Block and Kreman’s connection between resilience and engagement. They write, “ego-resilience is expected to predispose individuals not only to an absence of susceptibility to anxiety but also to a positive engagement with the world, as manifested by positive affect and openness to experience.”15 And here again is a practice; learners can practice a posture of openness to experience. This also can be deliberately included in direct instruction and modelling in inter-religious classes and settings. Below, we shall explore more deeply how “positive engagement with the world” supports a kind of resilience that might support deeper and longer-lasting student engagement.

      Longer-lasting

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