Empowering Resilience within the School Context

The aim of this article is first to familiarize readers with key conceptual constructs related to the resilience theory, focusing in particular on educational resilience. Emerging from resilience theory and models that are already used to foster resilience and as a consequence improve the quality of mental health and learning efficiency in different parts of the world, we are going to explore the prevalence of resilience fostering elements through the existing curriculum and pedagogical approaches in Slovenian elementary and secondary schools. We need to emphasise that resilience as a theoretical concept is not yet well known in Slovenia and there are no specialized programmes to foster resilience in children and youth, but we believe that quality teaching, which is based on European and national educational policies, already includes great part of it. With our research we would like to find out which educational approaches, recognized as resilience fostering approaches in resilience theory, are considered to be most important and are most widespread among our teachers. We are looking to explore the characteristics of teachers in Slovenia who perceive themselves as competent, motivated and effective in the educational fields and approaches that are also significant and recognized in the process for developing resilience in children and youth. For this matter we are going to prepare a questionnaire that measures teachers’ mindsets, and their standpoints about their own competences, effectiveness, and willingness for developing students' skills and competences that increase and enable resilience through the educational process. The research work is in the beginning stage; thus only the theoretical bases are presented in this paper.