Teaching resilience in fragile times

The outbreak of the pandemic, followed by harsh lockdowns, found me at a new work position as the coordinator of the Latin courses as part of the General Education at the University of Bonn. Without any specific template handy, all courses had to be reorganized to go online, depending merely on the experience and disposal of each lecturer. Afterward, I had plenty of time to observe the effects of mainly asynchronous teaching on both an immense number of students and their teachers. In a survey I ran for personal research purposes at the end of that first COVID-19 semester, the following points became clear: Students expect individual feedback, constructive interaction, and engaging content. The students’ responses were in many cases a direct plea for communication and socialization with their peers and teachers. At that point, I recalled Michel Serres’ Thumbelina, wittily translated into German as a “love confession to the networked generation.” In his work, the French philosopher discusses the necessity of considering the fact that transition to e-learning is also a matter of education policy rather than a matter of technological advance, because we need to educate our students to act in a new space of open, inventive thought, to match not only the transformation of technologies but rather the forms of knowledge and social organization they need to manage (Serres, 2012, 2014).

A few months later and parallel to my coordination tasks at the University of Bonn, I started in a new role as a lecturer in German of intensive language courses for international students at the University of Bielefeld. Of course, our students were residing in their home-countries (e.g., Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Australia, Greece, and France) at that time. So, one of our main concerns was to bring as much authentic input (e.g., original texts, videos recorded in our university building and on campus) as possible into the course. In the case of our German courses, interaction was in balance with asynchronous learning activities, following a flipped-classroom model which proved to be effective and fun for both students and lecturers, based on their feedback on instructional sequences and their exam results. However, although my students looked satisfied in class in September 2020, I observed how this started to gradually change in the subsequent courses. A reasonable explanation maybe the fact that virtual interaction was no longer the exception but rather had become the norm. Thus, the initial fun started to abate.

After the first lockdown, evaluations run at the University College of Teacher Education Lower Austria (PH Niederösterreich) regarding distance learning from the point of view both of teachers and students showed comparable evidence: On one hand, the workload of the courses was rated as appropriate and the frequency of the occasions for self-reflection as quite fair. On the other hand, although the statements on cooperation and a good working atmosphere—important factors for building resilience—were evaluated in a positive manner, there were still references to a latent feeling of loneliness (Weinzettl & Koglbauer, 2021, pp. 7–8). It was in April 2021, when I also ran my health literacy project DaF zum Wohl! for the first time, that I came to realize that the students were ready to address in a direct way crucial questions and issues regarding their own fragile resilience (Kolovou, 2022).

The history of resilience as a psychological quality is the outcome of a chain of interdisciplinary transfer processes (Hellige, 2019, pp. 30–51). The term literally means the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compression. In terms of psychology, resilience is the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change. A comprehensible definition, which I favor, is that resilience is the immune system of our psyche (Heller, 2013, p. 9), which in turn needs adequate regeneration and preservation. In that regard, and as a then newly minted prevention and health counselor, I felt it was my duty to sketch a resilience-focused curriculum, when I had been asked to teach two 1-week intensive courses for international scholarship holders online in Summer 2021. The approximately 30 students were still residing in their home-countries (e.g., Spain, Poland, Russia, Mongolia, China, Serbia, Egypt, Georgia, Iran, and Hungary). Therefore, social networking as well as immediate and interactive communication was one crucial area, while planning the course, also because language production at the B2/C1 levels was a goal. In this context and bearing in mind the health benefits of narratives in learning and education (Grüber, 2022; Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016), I set the goal to train my students in written text production and speaking only through social and emotional learning, in order to boost their mental resources.

In relation to various older as well as recently updated studies on resilience, there have been suggested different factors, pillars, areas, and skills which construct resilience as a dynamic process. These elements which contribute to effective stress and crisis management are flexible and can be learned. The terms for them vary in the literature; I attempt to summarize them for the purposes of this article as follows: (a) mindfulness, self-care, and self-reflection (b) self-awareness and acceptance (c) optimism (d) responsibility and decision making (e) positive network and commitment (f) solution orientation (g) future plans (for a critical discussion of the pillars of resilience see Allabauer, 2021, p. 3).

With this in mind, I started with a team-building activity: inviting the students to introduce themselves in different ways, even before classes started. First, they pinned their hometown on a world map on Padlet. Then, I invited them to a forum where they shared their expectations and point of view regarding online classes. Considering their input, I compiled our learning agreement. This is how I made clear that they themselves do matter and we can only work as a team by engaging with a common purpose. Afterward, I went on to implement our 5-day syllabus with the activities described in the following subsections.

Taking into account the feedback from students who experienced my resilience-focused curriculum already, it became apparent that language learning is a life-skills design process. We as language teachers, and most importantly in our role as (general) educators, can integrate a resilience first-aid toolkit in the teaching processes, to support our students in becoming self-aware, mindfully managing emotions, achieving smart goals, maintaining supportive connections, and making compassionate decisions. Here, the words of an Italian student who survived the Bergamo COVID-19 tragedy in 2020 are for me the most gratifying feedback in my teaching career so far: “In your class, I made new friends.” Motivated by the smile on everyone face, this mini resilience-focused syllabus of Summer 2021 is now part of my upcoming Salutogenius project, which also focuses on students’ health and well-being in intercultural language learning settings.