SCHOOL AS A SPACE FOR FOSTERING RESILIENCE

This second category, in particular, provided meaningful context and depth that enriched the discussion of the first one's findings, offering concrete examples and justifications drawn from teachers’ real-world experiences.

Ethical clearance was obtained from the Research Ethics Committee of Universitat Abat Oliba CEU. Participation was voluntary and all data were handled confidentially and anonymized.

Data were analyzed using Atlas.ti (version 22). A thematic coding approach was applied to identify patterns in teachers' responses. Codes were grouped under main categories such as: School as a safe and supportive environment, Teacher as resilience facilitator, Situational triggers for resilience-building (e.g., conflict resolution, peer interaction, coping with change), and Experiential practices (e.g., specific projects or emotional education activities).

Each coded segment was assigned a traceable identifier (e.g., “(12:35_77): Document 12, quotation 35, coded as ‘Resilience through peer mediation’”), ensuring transparency and rigor in data interpretation. Findings were also triangulated with the EDINRES+D interviews conducted with school leadership teams, providing additional validation of the perceived role of the school in fostering resilience.

3. THE IMPORTANTE ATTRIBUTED TO THE SCHOOL AS A SPACE FOR FOSTERING RESILIENCE: RELATED STUDIES AND SUPPORTING FINDINGS

3.1. The holistic and community nature of resilience

Regardless of the fact that all the teachers agreed with the notion that the school is an ideal space to foster resilience, the majority also expressed the conviction that the participation of the family in this process is very important. However, in some cases they put more emphasis on the school, while others placed it on the family, or they seemed to put the same emphasis on both spaces.

Before describing the reasons the teachers gave to argue their positions on this issue, it is worth remembering that, from the perspective of recent contributions to studies on resilience, it seems evident that the acquisition and fostering of resilient traits must involve a holistic process that encompasses all areas of the life of the individual and society. In his work “Local and community resilience in the face of the crisis of the system”, Joseba Azkarraga (2014, p. 89) portrays a gloomy panorama of a systemic crisis in contemporary societies in which “the disarticulation of social space as a world of shared meaning and a secure network of links has the potential to disarticulate the individual subject that is supported in this network and this world” and lists, following the WHO, “stress, anxiety and depression, both in the North and in the South” as “diseases that threaten to become major pandemics”. Faced with these collective threats, which have a negative impact on the individual, we also need to search for, according to the author, community or collective solutions that involve all social agents —not only family and school, but also associations, non-governmental organizations, initiative groups capable of promoting resilience-building programs (such as the one proposed in the ANDREIA project) and a host of valuable initiatives that are emerging in various parts of the world and which the author brings together under the common concept of Transition Initiatives. These initiatives, according to Azkarraga, are a reason for hope despite numerous fears and threats. However, the step that should be taken and that is in its very earlystages, is to promote actions “at a regional, national and international scale” (Azkarraga, 2014, p. 103). Along the same lines, many other authors insist on the community and holistic character, such as Forés and Grané (2012) or Kotliarenco (2014). Forés and Grané (2012) identify three basic systems that surround the subject and on which foundations must be provided to foster a resilient character: the family, the school and the community. They also offer practical advice regarding the basic lines of action in each of them (pp. 98-108).

However, returning to the interviews with the teachers participating in the project, it is illustrative to observe the differences regarding the primacy they gave to the school or the family in the process of fostering resilience according to their own experience and reflection. The interviews revealed a notable variety of opinions in relation to this issue that should be taken into account when proposing programs to foster resilience in educational settings.

3.2. The school ahead of the family

In the group of teachers who attributed greater importance to the school than the family as a space for fostering resilience, again, we find professionals from both state and grant-aided schools. One of the state school teachers argued: “We spend a lot of time with them here, many hours and you notice they’re more stressed and when you start to push them, they trust you in the end, they trust you because of that, because it’s the only place where they can unwind” (2:21_43). In other state schools we heard the following statements: “The school’s the ideal place to work on it [resilience]” (23:6_35), and in another, in a more specific way: “Many of our pupils, who have the neighbourhood they have and the situations they have, have a really bad time at home and of course, being able to go back to school and socialize with other ways of doing, being, seeing and living, I think it’s helped [make them more resilient]” (28:6_22).

Similarly, in grant-aided schools, some teachers placed greater emphasis on the role of the school in fostering resilience. One identified family overprotection as the main reason for the difficulty in fostering resilience in the family (an issue that will be addressed specifically in a section further on in this chapter). Thus we heard statements such as: “That parental love blinds us or perhaps makes it difficult for us to view them more objectively and support them” (10:16_35); and in another school: “I really believe that the only space left to give them those tools to be able to face life —that life is full of obstacles— is school” (17:14_36); and yet another, starting from a comparative perspective as a teacher and mother at the same time, emphasized socialization at school: “It’s increasingly difficult for parents in the family environment to educate in the broad sense of the term and in particular in this matter, so school has the advantage of enabling socialization” (18:12_29).

3.3. The family ahead of the school

Contrary to what was described in the previous section, other teachers, though not denying the importance of the school as a space for fostering resilience, placed greater emphasis on the importance of addressing it in the family, highlighting that without the support and collaboration of the family it is very difficult, or even impossible for some, to strengthen skills related to resilience. Thus, in the state schools collaborating with the ANDREIA project, some forceful statements were collected in this regard, such as the following: “The family is always the main thing, so sometimes you can’t escape from what your family gives you (…) (19:10_33).

They also described the difficulty caused by a lack of a unified approach on the part of the family in the following terms: “Here at school we try to do it [foster resilience] and we do quite well (...) but we’re left a little helpless because they follow the family more” (19:34_61). The problems caused by a lack of a common criterion between the educational action in the school and in the family environment came up in a significant number of interviews. This was observed not only in state schools but also in grant-aided schools, where, among the statements that emerged along this line, it is worth highlighting, for example, the following: “Without the help of families, at school we can’t [foster resilience]” (9:13_55); “If I don’t have this family support, we can try to instil [resilience], but it’s really important that they experience it in the family” (9:15_57). All this is due to the fact that “The family is much more important than the school” (9:14_56).

3.4. School and family: equal opportunity and responsibility

As a final approach regarding the attribution of importance to the different spaces for fostering resilience, the position that some teachers maintained when establishing a certain balance between the school and family roles stood out. Along this line, we observed how in one of the state schools a teacher stated that the task of teaching resilience must be carried out by “the school, together with the families and the entire educational community” (22:4_22); and in another interview, the teacher insisted that “if we can connect the work of the family and the school, even better” (22:6_23).

Similarly, in grant-aided schools there were also those who demanded the equitable distribution of the weight of responsibility between the family and the school, such as the teacher who gave a positive example of collaboration: “Personally, it’s helped me a lot when the school has notified the parents, when we’ve worked on some virtue, because it’s true that they support us a lot; so the school, yes, but also from home” (10:20_37). Another participant mentioned this collaboration and sharing of responsibility as a necessary condition for successful fostering of resilience. Otherwise, they affirmed, “a project that only stays within the school walls falls short, and therefore, if it isn’t supported by parallel work, at least communicative (...), it won’t do any good (...); if it doesn’t have continuity during the day [at school and in the family] it’s pointless (...)” (17:17_40).

Nevertheless, and regardless of whether emphasis is placed on the school, the family or on the equal collaboration between the two, what is striking, as mentioned at the beginning and verified in this section, is that in no instance did they reject the idea of fostering resilience at school, not even in the case of those who had to have the meaning of such a concept explained to them at the beginning of the interview because they lacked prior knowledge of it.

Having verified the importance given to the topic, in the following section we identify in detail the specific reasons that appeared recurrently in the different interviews and that, according to the respondents, would justify the fostering of resilience at school.

4. DISCUSSING AND GOING DEEPER IN RESULTS: REASONS TO CONSIDER THE SCHOOL AS A SPACE TO BUILD

Today we know not only through intuition and the always illuminating speculative philosophy of the classics (Echavarría, 2018), but also through the empirical research of more recent authors who have dedicated their lives to school research, that formal education can be a privileged space for the development of the individual (Amado, Fernández and Oporto, 2020). However, precisely because of them, we also know that the opposite can be the case (Guerrero Serón, 1996). The school, therefore, is not per se in the abstract suitable or not for human development. It is its development in action, in a specific context in which specific people, flesh and blood, interact, facing particular circumstances in an equally particular way, which will determine whether or not its potentialities are put to good use. In our study we aim to provide elements that help turn these school potentialities into realities, focusing on an essential aspect, namely that of resilience. In this regard, the extensive process of interviewing early childhood and primary education teachers about the potentialities that they themselves highlight implies a “pool” of reality that puts specific reasons, sifted through the sieve of experience, on the table; an immersion in specific contexts of those who are, day after day, on the tatami of educational combat, which gives us a privileged vision to determine relevant arguments.

We have already explained how, after analysing the various comments and even with different levels of importance, it was possible to verify the enormous consideration of the school as a suitable space for the fostering of resilience by teachers and also how we were able to identify the systematic appearance of reasons that justified this affirmation. Next, we describe in the following sections the subcategories in which they were grouped.

4.1. The school as a space for socialization

Both state and grant-aided school participants stated that the school is a privileged space for socialization and, therefore, also for fostering resilience.

Several professionals interviewed agreed that the school is an extension of society, which makes it possible to find spaces of adversity in it naturally, as happens in society. This statement serves as an example of many of them: “The school is also [influential], it’s a continuation of society” (19:13_34), with the difference that they can be dealt with in a more systematized way because the educator has more control over the context of action and can even deal with conflicts in a specific way due to the demands of the curriculum. This is reflected in comments such as the following: “What I see they’ve most needed this year, above all, is to express emotions, feel listened to and also to listen to the opinion of the others” (24:24_48);“I’d say that it’s increasingly difficult for parents to educate in the broad sense of the term and in particular in this matter within the family environment, so the school has the advantage of socialization” (18:12_29); “I think that the school in many cases is providing things that you used to see at home and that you had at home”(20:8_32).

Other research carried out in the educational field also highlights this inter-influence. As an example, we cite De la Fuente (2012), who shows how cultural changes inevitably affect the school. This is evidenced through a specific experience based on such an everyday element as music, which very often penetrates into the classroom, even if only through intimate comments or produced in pupils’ moments of expansion. De la Fuente (2012) explains, as most professionals do in our ANDREIA study, that a school becomes, whether intentionally or not, a “test bed” with members from very different contexts outside of the system itself but who, by virtue of daily coexistence, become socializing agents with mutual influences from which they cannot escape. This means that the difficulties that take place outside the school environment affect the school. However, beyond being considered an inconvenience, if we look at it from the point of view of resilience, we will realize that it constitutes an opportunity for coping.

4.2. The school as a space free of overprotection

In this section we will continue to explore the identification of the socialization process in order to address the issue of overprotection referred to under this heading with certainty and greater depth. It is therefore important to understand that, like the family, the school is a space for socialization, as human relationships are established in both contexts. Fernández Enguita (1998, p. 100) specifies that the human relationships from which no person —precisely by being a person— can escape, make up what we could call the “socialization process”, which would be defined and made visible through a triple influence that the socializing context (family or school) would exert on the person (offspring or pupil) through many other types of actions, namely: inculcation (internalization of ideas about reality), selection (the school or the family do not transmit culture, in general, but a culture) and exclusion (voluntarily or involuntarily, cultural or social elements that are not the subject of educational action are always excluded). At ANDREIA we identified that, in one way or another, the interviewees alluded to these three actions typical of the socialization process. This analytical look at it helps us to recognize more clearly how the opinions given by the participants make it operational, that is, they translate it into a palpable reality for them, in which resilience plays a decisive role. We observed, therefore, how several of their most representative statements identified with each of the socializing processes mentioned, and how they directly relate them to the possibilities of teaching resilience at school. Having identified the first two, we will explore more extensively the third, as it is especially relevant for understanding this section: