Educational Resilience in the Digital

UniversityMartin Oliver

UCL Institute of Education

m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk

Where this began…

JISC-funded digital literacies project

Gourlay & Oliver (2012) – combat, curation and coping

Touching a wider concern

In the US, roughly half of all undergraduates fail to complete their degrees (Bergman et al, 2014).

Tinto’s analysis (1997) of college leavers & the concept of persistence, linked to “students’ involvement or integration in the life of the college”

Barnett (2007) and the “fragility” of students’ will to learn, and the importance of self-belief on persistence, and the role of others in supporting this.

Ross et al (2013): resilience as “the ability to navigate conditions of complexity and change. In practice, in this context, this mostly means that the student keeps going and successfully achieves the qualification sought.”

‘Grit’ as a determinant of success (Duckworth & Gross, 2014), where “grit predicts the completion of challenging goals despite obstacles and setbacks” (p320)

Precursors of resilience

The term risk is not being used to refer to the vulnerabilities

of children who have specific, clinical, biological, cognitive,

affective or sensory disorders (e.g. physical handicap, mental

retardation, ADHD, autism, hearing or visual impairment).

Risk is being used here to refer to environmental factors that

either singly or in combination have been shown to render

children’s failure to thrive more likely. (Howard et al, 1999:

307-8)

To sociology and schools

…others, also vulnerable – exposed to poverty, biological risks,

and family instability, and reared by parents with little

education or serious mental health problems – who remained

invincible and developed into competent and autonomous

young adults. (Werner & Smith, 1982: 3)

The risks of ‘risk’

Pupils labeled ‘at risk’ were:

“often those whose appearance, language, culture, values,

home communities, and family structures […] do not

match those of the dominant culture, suggesting that

ideological factors may be implicated in the construction

or application of the concept of risk”. (Howard et

al,1999: 308),

From ‘risk’ to ‘resilience’

Brown (2004:21): initially, resilience understood simply to

“represent the opposite of risk factors”

Moved on initially to ‘resilience factors’

Subsequent revisions reframe the concept more positively,

expressing it in terms of processes of being resilient,

rather than taxonomic classifications of personality or

socio-economic category

Reported associations

More likely to… Less likely to…

Value and be satisfied with school

Have positive perceptions of family, peer

and teacher support

Read more and do more homework

Be from higher socioeconomic areas

Be religious

Participate in extra-curricula activities

Have higher social, academic self-concept

Have an achievement motivation

Expect to graduate high school, and

attend graduate schools and colleges

Perceive their classroom favourably

Perceive their teachers as having high

expectations of them

Achieve high grades

Be invited to join a gang

Bring weapons to school

Experience conflicts with other students

Experience family conflicts

Be exposed to violence

Be shy, tired, unattentive or bored in class

Be distracted or disruptive when working

Spend time in class socializing with other

students

From diagnosis to

intervention

The resiliency perspective […] may help us design more

effective educational interventions because it enables us to

specifically identify those ‘alterable’ factors that distinguish

resilient and nonresilient students. […] The construct of

‘educational resilience’ is not viewed as a fixed attribute of

some students, but rather as alterable processes or

mechanisms that can be developed and fostered. In other

words, this approach does not focus on attributes such as

ability, because ability has not been found to be characteristic

of resilient students. (Waxman et al, 2004: 4).

…and on to agency

Was restitution to be accomplished by the system putting into

place the umbrella of protective factors that corrected the deficits

in the students? In other words, was the system the active

agency, and the students the passive recipients? (Silva & Radigan,

2004: 166)

…in the Digital University?

Understood theoretically in terms of a tradition of work drawing on sociomaterial perspectives, and related work including networked learning

Crook (2002) – ‘learning nests’

Cornford & Pollock (2002) – the campus as resourceful constraint

Fenwick et al (2011) – sociomateriality of education and knowledge work

Jones & Healing (2010) – integration of technologies into everyday life

Gourlay (2012) – posthuman reframing of lecturing and the distribution of teaching across people and technologies

Etc…

Not (quite) this resilience:

To date, resilience in the Digital University has focused on institutions not learners

Weller, 2011; Weller & Anderson, 2013; Hall & Winn, 2011

(Although some discussion of individuals in Hall & Winn)

Environmental metaphors of resilience

Organisations in ecosystems; systems theory

The continuation of ‘the university’ in the face of developing challenges (peak oil, sustainability, disruptive technologies, etc)

Potential for a connection (via networks) with post-ANT?

The unfortunate opening of

black boxesObjects, no matter how important, efficient, central, or necessary they may be, tend to recede into the background. […] The third type of occasion [when they become visible] is that offered by accidents, breakdowns, and strikes: all of a sudden, completely silent intermediaries become full-blown mediators; even objects, which a minute before appeared fully automatic, autonomous, and devoid of human agents, are now made of crowds of frantically moving humans with heavy equipment. Those who watched the Columbia shuttle instantly transformed from the most complicated human instrument ever assembled to a rain of debris falling over Texas will realize how quickly objects flip-flop their mode of existence. (Latour, 2005: 81)

Sociomaterial resilience

Punctualisation (Law, 1992) as a marker of success

Resilience as a response to breakdowns

Problems with ‘enrolment’ – when “translation becomes

treason, tradutore – traditore, once an enrolled entity refuses

to enter the actor-world” (Callon, 1986: 25)

Reconfiguring the ‘actor-world’ by bringing in alternative

actants to achieve equivalent or comparable ends

‘Heterogeneous re-engineering’

Institutions as well as individuals involved in this process

(Law, 1992)

Revisiting ‘combat’

I feel like, also that Google is equally watching you. You know, they’re all watching you, they’re all trying to sell you things, and the thing is not, I don’t so much mind being bombarded with advertising as I mind having things put about me on things like Facebook that I don’t want. You know, I don’t want my friends to spy on me, I don’t want my friends to know what I listen to on YouTube. (Sally Interview 1)

Use of different – and parallel – email accounts to create boundaries around strands of life

Working around the (treasonous) agency of technology, not removing it (re-engineer the network, not the ‘black box’ of Googlemail)

Revisiting ‘coping’

LibraryA printer that only

prints single-sidedDesks

Another university

Desktop computer

Electronic

resources

A printer that prints double-sided

University

A girlfriend

Another desktopHer password

Limited budget

Conclusions

Resilience as an elusive but pervasive issue

A disconnect from a long tradition of work (…in other settings)

Visible in interesting ways in the context of the digital university

Sociomaterial ideas as a possible bridge between different areas of work, and of theorising agency (resilience as achieving a social success, rather than a personal, internal characteristic)

Resilience through re-engineering: can institutions provide resources and infrastructure that are easier to enroll?

References

Barnett, R. (2007) A will to learn: being a student in an age of uncertainty. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill

Education.

Bergman, M., Gross, J. P., Berry, M., & Shuck, B. (2014). If Life Happened but a Degree Didn’t:

Examining Factors That Impact Adult Student Persistence. The Journal of Continuing Higher

Education, 62 (2), 90-101.

Brown, J. (2004) Resilience: emerging social constructions in educational policy, research, and

practice. In Waxman. H., Padrón, Y., & Gray, J. (eds) Educational Resiliency: Student, teacher and school

perspectives, 11-36. Greenwich, CO: Information Age Publishing.

Callon, M. (1986) Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops

and Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Law, J. (ed) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of

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learning: Social and Cultural Approaches to Practice, 170-181. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Crook, C. (2002) The campus experience of networked learning. In Networked learning: Perspectives

and issues, 293-308. London: Springer.

References

Duckworth, A. & Gross, J. (2014) Self-Control and Grit: Related but Separable Determinants of

Success. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23 (5), 319-325.

Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing

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