Written by Rosemarie Nassif, SSND, PhD, executive director, LMU School of Education Center for Catholic Education
Are you born resilient? Can you learn resilience? How do you identify your capacity for resilience? Resilience is much discussed today, perhaps because life stressors seem to have grown in number and intensity, especially since COVID, and include political stress, relationship stress, employment stress, family stress, change stress. Why is resilience so important to all of us as educators, parents, counselors, therapists?
My mother taught me resilience. She lived 97 active and engaged years, facing many challenges and difficulties. Her parents were immigrants from Lebanon, at that time a very patriarchal culture. As the second oldest of nine children (5 girls and 4 boys), she began working at her father’s grocery store in St. Louis at age 13. She did all the finances for the family business, having an 8th-grade education and speaking in both English and Arabic and delivered groceries to the customers. Her father built the relationships. She managed the business. Right before she passed at age 97, she struggled with pneumonia and said to me, “Honey, I’m not going on the shelf.”
There is much research and anecdotal evidence that students experience traumatic realities that significantly impact their wholeness—their wellness, trauma that may not have been as dominant for most of us when we went to Catholic school. Even when we defined “whole-child education,” we talked about it in terms of emotional, spiritual and social wellness—not as mental wellness. When we mentioned the mind, we meant it in terms of academic achievement.
Everyone reading this article, every educator, every teacher and administrator likely knows a young person—perhaps in your school, in your family, in your neighborhood, parish, a friend of your daughter or son—who is suffering mentally. Rejection, isolation and difference that diminishes him or her in the eyes of those from whom they want and seek a bond even to the point of contemplating taking his or her own life. It is sad and even horrific to realize that suicide has been the second highest cause of death for 15- to 24-year-old youth for many decades.
Researchers define resilience as the capacity to absorb disturbance and then reorganize to regain one’s identity and capacity. The word “regain” can be misleading by implying that resilience means going back to one’s previous state. Resilience is not about not changing. It requires evolving as a result of all that is learned and experienced through the disturbance. Every disturbance, every mistake, every failure, every loss, every grief is a test, a source of learning about myself, about my reality. Resilience means not going back to who we were. Rather garnering the suffering in ways to learn our weakness, our lack of openness, our world’s dismissiveness of another’s uniqueness and emerge as a stronger self. When will we learn that we have much to learn—especially as educators?
We may not be born “resilient.” We are all born with the capacity to become resilient. Catholic school educators always go beyond teaching the three Rs: reading, writing, arithmetic—and today we seek to instill in our students that fourth R—resilience. Resilience is not a subject that is taught like a history lesson, nor a mathematic problem, nor a Shakespeare play or a science experiment. It is a mindset and corresponding behaviors that educators can explicitly promote through day-to-day interactions with students. The Simon Sinek Golden Circle, depicted below, has much to teach us as educators. It is not about “What” (outer circle) we teach as much as it is about “Why” (inner circle) we teach or “How” (middle circle) we teach. Our Why inspires more than our What. Our Why connects to our mission, our purpose, our vocation. It is our How” we relate to each and every student that changes lives. Our Why and our How are much more powerful than our What.
Students may hear our What, but they feel our Why and our How. Our Why and our How teach resilience much more than our WHAT. Integrating Resilience engages three Ws—Worth, Will and Wonder.
- Worth: belief that he or she is worthy of our time, our belief in him or her, our highest expectations.
- Will: discipline and courage to achieve, grit to overcome obstacles.
- Wonder: belief in the promise, belief in the more he or she can become, the more he or she can create for our world, a curiosity that is fed by optimism.
RESILIENCE = WORTH + WILL + WONDER.
I have been in the world of education for many years. Education is the long view. The students I hear from after 20, 30 or even 40 years tell me more about learning the three Ws than the three Rs.
Come see Sr. Rosemarie at NCEA 2025: Be the Light in Orlando, FL, April 22 – 24.
