Resilience in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic: A scoping literature review with implications for evidence-informed policymaking

Abstract

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the construct of resilience has received growing attention in the higher education literature. The pandemic, acting as an external stressor, impacted multiple higher education settings in 2020 during the period of lockdowns, when universities had to temporarily close on-campus activities and shift to online emergency responses. The objective of this scoping review is to explore how resilience was conceptualized in the higher education research literature during the initial emergency response phase of the pandemic, and how conceptual and research design choices in this early body of literature shaped policy recommendations aimed at enhancing the resilience of individuals and support systems in higher education. This article, thus, contributes to the ongoing discussion in the academic and policy-relevant literature on how to better prepare universities as organizations and communities for a response not only during the emergency pandemic, but also beyond, in post-pandemic higher education settings. We find that the first wave of academic literature on the subject largely focused on resilience at the individual level, and more so on the resilience of students rather than the resilience of faculty and academic support staff. Resilience as a group-level construct was the focus of empirical study only in a few articles in our review sample, and even then, there were differences in the ways the concept was defined and operationalized, making comparisons between studies virtually impossible. We also found support for the argument that depending on the operationalization of the concept, some forms of resilience inadvertently may decrease other forms of resilience– either when resilience is conceptualized differently, or operationalized at a different level of analysis. The fragmentation in the literature reflecting different conceptualizations and measurements of resilience as a construct complicates the academic conversation in the field and the process of making recommendations for the design of support policies. In conclusion, the article makes several suggestions on promising lines of further research which can advance the state of art in the field.