Spring 2006

Wellbeing and connectedness

Dreaming resilience

Australia has its origins in the dreamtime but appears to have problems helping people to dream, asserts Andrew Fuller. Here he discusses how wellbeing is connected to the ability to learn and succeed.

When I conduct resilience seminars for students, I ask them to identify an area of their lives in which they would like to excel, to imagine they have succeeded and discuss what they did to excel. A significant proportion can’t do it. Consistently, about 40 per cent of students are either unwilling or unable to imagine excelling in any area of their lives.

The situation is worst in country areas. In rural and remote schools, I ask participants a fairly simple question, ‘Do you think you are as bright or as clever as students in the capital cities?’ Almost without exception, their answer is a resounding, ‘No!’

So I decided to do a similar activity at staff days. Guess what? About 20 per cent of the educators attending are also either unwilling or unable to imagine excelling in any areas of their lives. This is relatively consistent across all states of Australia and across all types of schools.

At first, I thought I was dealing with the laconic Australian culture that derides big-noting oneself. Deeper investigation revealed that a significant proportion of people just do not have dreams, goals or aspirations for their lives. At best, they hope to minimise the despair and to reduce the let-downs by not getting their hopes up too much.

Creating resilient outcomes for people is the result of multiple factors. One of the key ingredients is high expectations and hope. This is the very spark that ignites possibility. Without hopes and dreams, people are destined to lives of sullen pessimism and cynical disaffection.

When I work with school leaders and ask them what they want for their students, the answers are fairly similar. They want them to be good global citizens who have the skills and abilities to think clearly, critically and creatively, to be curious about the world, to problem-solve and also to be able to communicate and cooperate well with others. When I work with business leaders, they agree, and they add self-starting entrepreneurialism to the list.

As we move from the information age into the conceptual age, new sets of skills and abilities will be needed to thrive. Knowledge and skills are no longer contained in discrete silos. It seems likely that resilient people will need to know how to gain knowledge from multiple sources, integrate those concepts in diverse ways and be able to apply and transfer understandings in a variety of settings.

We need to talk up the possibilities for success, to help inject hope and to broaden the definition of success so that it can be gained in many forms. The ‘Click and Go’ generation of young people is yearning for this. They love being associated with exemplary products and ideas. Schools should be places where maturing minds are awakened and excited to new ways of viewing the world and people. Schools need to be playgrounds for the brain.

Sadly, this is not what I see when I visit many schools. I see many well-intentioned but exhausted educators battling to rush through a curriculum that treats learning as a chore rather than a joy, and success as a limited and narrowly defined commodity. This not only disengages young learning minds, it also stifles resilience.

It is time to create a debate that goes beyond what form of standardised measurement schools should use to a broader discussion about the types of schooling practices and learning experiences that will set people up for success in the 21st century. Australia has the infrastructure, wealth and talent to create good global citizens who are excited about their lives and their learning.

Alongside this, we need to recognise that our approach to increasing the resilience of young people has been too scatter-gun. Too often, resilience-building programs are selected on the basis of whatever staff may have been exposed to and are then squeezed into a short timeslot known as home-room time or pastoral care groups. This is not sufficient for developing the capacities needed for success.

Instead, we need approaches that systematically assess the needs of populations and implement specific strategies to meet those needs—approaches that enable us to assess the impact of interventions over time. We have the capacity to do this.

Research into resilience has revealed that the three key factors underpinning resilience in young people are:

1. a sense of belonging to family
2. a diversity of friendships
3. having an adult outside the family who takes a positive interest in them.

Schools and communities can actively support the development of these three critical factors by providing support for parents, developing school practices that involve parents positively, and by using curriculum materials that promote family engagement in learning and positive school experiences. Communities should also be urged to consider funding home visits for new families.

Peer groups can be diversified if communities support youth groups and provide a range of recreational facilities. Schools have a powerful role in socialising children and can play a critical role in broadening young people’s friendships by using cooperative learning methods that involve students in working with a variety of peer groups. Short, sharp group work not only diversifies peer connections, it is also correlated with improvements in student engagement and academic outcomes.

Communities can facilitate the presence of a positive adult outside the family by implementing mentoring programs and looking for opportunities for students and adults to mix in a variety of settings.

Teachers often take the role of the significant adult outside the family. Schools can facilitate this by adopting one of the key pieces of research that differentiates high performing schools from their less productive counterparts: create small schools within large schools. Schools can create structures that allow closer relationships between teachers and students so that the teachers speak about their students rather than the students.

We have allowed the delusional belief that the wellbeing of young people is disconnected from their ability to learn and succeed for too long. Split-brain thinking is still evident in the structures of many schools.

Schools can be extremely powerful in promoting resilience. We need to resource and support schools to do this. Perhaps even more importantly, we need to encourage schools to be bold and creative in making the necessary changes that will create resilient young Australians for the 21st century.

Reference

Fuller A, Bellhouse B & Johnston G (2001). The Heart Masters: A program for the promotion of resilience and emotional intelligence in the middle to senior years of primary school, Inyahead Press, Melbourne.

Andrew Fuller is a clinical psychologist and family therapist.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au