Have you ever noticed that some of us just seem more resilient than others? Like I know this is a muscle that can be worked out, a practice that can be internalized. But for real. It seems like some people are born with it. If this is the case, let it be known: I was not born with it. My dad and my eldest daughter most certainly were.
My father, whom I feel like figures prominently in every other blog, is the type to be irrationally persistent. More than once growing up I can recall my mother and I begging him to call a plumber/electrician/HVAC expert/insert thing here. Did he ever cave? NO. He just methodically took apart whatever was broken and tried a thousand things until the issue was fixed. This was, mind you, before the days of easy access to all the youtube tutorials. The man, who as a child took apart computers and other appliances he found in trash heaps to learn about for the fun of it, is wired to stay calm and slowly gather data and learn from mistakes. Are all engineers this way?
My daughter is more of the normal-spectrum-healthy variety of persistent. She is the person Zander and Alianna go to for nearly any “fix or open this thing” kind of problem, since she turned about six years old. And really, they pretty much always go to her for homework help now too. The kids know I will quickly abandom the project when it doesn’t quickly bend to my command. Lucy just digs deep and gets comfortable in her pursuit of a solution. She almost seems drawn in even more, in fact, when things get tough. “Oh you are trying to stump me?!” she sneers back at the can of spaghetti sauce that I can’t seem to open. “CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!”
Which leads us to me, whose favorite words are “whoops, I can’t open that, go ask your father.” When Justin Rust with his old-fashioned manners took my parents out to dinner to ask for my hand in marriage, my father replied in the affirmative, but quickly followed it up with: “There’s something you should know about Julie. She’s a bit like a golden retriever. One minute she’s chasing after one thing and the next minute she sees a squirrel and runs off in the the other direction. Good luck with that one.”
Hey dad, I’ve been married for 20 years. (In the words of Alianna Rust when she proves herself right, especially to her brother. . . ) BAM!
The thing is, I am incredibly resilient and persistent and focused when it comes to things I care about (Running! Writing! Teaching!) It’s the other stuff, the spaghetti sauce jars, the house cleaning and yard care, opening up doors with keys (I wish I was kidding) that I just kind of abandon with a good shrug and a good dose of learned helplessness. “I’m just not good at that stuff, so I’m not going to even try.”
All of this begs the question, what if our levels of resilience at any given task is less a genetic or brain-wiring precondition, and more about the stories we hear and tell about our identies and then consquently live out?
Mesmin Destin, Associate Professor at Northwestern, argues just this, in his important work with traditionally under-resourced youth in education. It turns out that resources and access to positive educational experiences matter a lot for youth achievement, but the reason they come to matter so much is about identity formation and the motivation that then results. His work reminds us that moving from a deficit-based to strengths-based perspective that emphasizes students’ community cultural wealth and the various capital they can leverage from their communities (navigational capital, linguistic capital, social capital, etc.) can make huge and measurable differences in a students’ success. If we can tell and retell the story of students’ background specific strengths (e.g. street smarts birthed of marginalization and adversity) we can, not only increase their self esteem, but their ability to believe that actual achievement on academic tests.
Elephant in the room: we teach at a place of privilege with a disproportionate population of students that come from socioeconomic backgrounds of wealth. How can we equip them with a greater variety of stories about success and skills that the youth from less-economically-privileged backgrounds might bring to their soccer team, their future college classrooms, their future workplace? Second elephant in the room: not all of our students come from wealth. How can we boost their motivation to succeed by emphasizing their background specific strengths? Third elephant in the room: a whole lot of our students (hello intersectionality) carry other identities that have been traditionally recognized from a deficits-perspective. How can we flip the script in our own attitudes and expectations as teachers from “those kinds of students”?
What about our curricula or approaches make it so hard for us to move from deficit to strength-based perspectives about all the difference that fills our classrooms? How can we make space for new stories to circulate about ourselves and others?
Note: For Destin’s slideshow from SAIS this year, see this link.