Building professional resilience: School music teachers’ instructional practice development under curriculum reform

Abstract

This study used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the characteristics and development of teachers’ resilience profiles during ongoing school music curriculum reforms in mainland China. During a 12-month voluntary teacher development project, seven mid-career schoolteachers based in Shenzhen City, South China, helped collect longitudinal data on their resilience profiles and instructional practices. Inspired by Mansfield’s resilience model, this study developed a model of the essential dynamics in the resilience development process of individual teachers. The working model mapped the identified factors of teachers’ resilience development into a coordinate system that incorporated two approaches (receptive and autonomous) to resilience building, with two scenarios (mandatory or conditional) in curriculum implementation. The findings suggested that (a) teachers exhibited different resilience properties shaped by both personal and contextual factors, as well as the connection pathways between factors, and (b) teachers used a variety of strategies to build resilience to policy and environmental constraints, including mentoring, peer support, problem-solving, relationship management, and pedagogy innovation. These strategies were mapped onto a functional model for resilience development in curriculum implementation, which further extended the application of Mansfield’s conceptual framework to teacher education programs. Although this study recognized the value of quantitative research instruments in capturing resilience profiles, the ecological validity and reliability concerns of these measurements were also discussed.