1. Educational Resilience
in the Digital
University
Martin Oliver
UCL Institute of Education
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk
2. Where this began…
JISC-funded digital literacies project
Gourlay & Oliver (2012) – combat, curation and coping
3. Touching a wider concern
In the US, roughly half of all undergraduates fail to complete their
degrees (Bergman et al, 2014).
Tinto’s analysis (1997) of college leavers & the concept of persistence,
linked to “students’ involvement or integration in the life of the college”
Barnett (2007) and the “fragility” of students’ will to learn, and the
importance of self-belief on persistence, and the role of others in
supporting this.
Ross et al (2013): resilience as “the ability to navigate conditions of
complexity and change. In practice, in this context, this mostly means
that the student keeps going and successfully achieves the qualification
sought.”
‘Grit’ as a determinant of success (Duckworth & Gross, 2014), where
“grit predicts the completion of challenging goals despite obstacles and
setbacks” (p320)
4. Precursors of resilience
The term risk is not being used to refer to the vulnerabilities
of children who have specific, clinical, biological, cognitive,
affective or sensory disorders (e.g. physical handicap, mental
retardation, ADHD, autism, hearing or visual impairment).
Risk is being used here to refer to environmental factors that
either singly or in combination have been shown to render
children’s failure to thrive more likely. (Howard et al, 1999:
307-8)
5. To sociology and schools
…others, also vulnerable – exposed to poverty, biological risks,
and family instability, and reared by parents with little
education or serious mental health problems – who remained
invincible and developed into competent and autonomous
young adults. (Werner & Smith, 1982: 3)
6. The risks of ‘risk’
Pupils labeled ‘at risk’ were:
“often those whose appearance, language, culture, values,
home communities, and family structures […] do not
match those of the dominant culture, suggesting that
ideological factors may be implicated in the construction
or application of the concept of risk”. (Howard et
al,1999: 308),
7. From ‘risk’ to ‘resilience’
Brown (2004:21): initially, resilience understood simply to
“represent the opposite of risk factors”
Moved on initially to ‘resilience factors’
Subsequent revisions reframe the concept more positively,
expressing it in terms of processes of being resilient,
rather than taxonomic classifications of personality or
socio-economic category
8. Reported associations
More likely to… Less likely to…
Value and be satisfied with school
Have positive perceptions of family, peer
and teacher support
Read more and do more homework
Be from higher socioeconomic areas
Be religious
Participate in extra-curricula activities
Have higher social, academic self-concept
Have an achievement motivation
Expect to graduate high school, and
attend graduate schools and colleges
Perceive their classroom favourably
Perceive their teachers as having high
expectations of them
Achieve high grades
Be invited to join a gang
Bring weapons to school
Experience conflicts with other students
Experience family conflicts
Be exposed to violence
Be shy, tired, unattentive or bored in class
Be distracted or disruptive when working
Spend time in class socializing with other
students
9. From diagnosis to
intervention
The resiliency perspective […] may help us design more
effective educational interventions because it enables us to
specifically identify those ‘alterable’ factors that distinguish
resilient and nonresilient students. […] The construct of
‘educational resilience’ is not viewed as a fixed attribute of
some students, but rather as alterable processes or
mechanisms that can be developed and fostered. In other
words, this approach does not focus on attributes such as
ability, because ability has not been found to be characteristic
of resilient students. (Waxman et al, 2004: 4).
10. …and on to agency
Was restitution to be accomplished by the system putting into
place the umbrella of protective factors that corrected the deficits
in the students? In other words, was the system the active
agency, and the students the passive recipients? (Silva & Radigan,
2004: 166)
11. …in the Digital University?
Understood theoretically in terms of a tradition of work drawing on
sociomaterial perspectives, and related work including networked
learning
Crook (2002) – ‘learning nests’
Cornford & Pollock (2002) – the campus as resourceful constraint
Fenwick et al (2011) – sociomateriality of education and knowledge
work
Jones & Healing (2010) – integration of technologies into everyday
life
Gourlay (2012) – posthuman reframing of lecturing and the
distribution of teaching across people and technologies
Etc…
12. Not (quite) this resilience:
To date, resilience in the Digital University has focused on
institutions not learners
Weller, 2011; Weller & Anderson, 2013; Hall & Winn, 2011
(Although some discussion of individuals in Hall & Winn)
Environmental metaphors of resilience
Organisations in ecosystems; systems theory
The continuation of ‘the university’ in the face of
developing challenges (peak oil, sustainability, disruptive
technologies, etc)
Potential for a connection (via networks) with post-ANT?
13. The unfortunate opening of
black boxes
Objects, no matter how important, efficient, central, or necessary
they may be, tend to recede into the background. […] The third type
of occasion [when they become visible] is that offered by accidents,
breakdowns, and strikes: all of a sudden, completely silent
intermediaries become full-blown mediators; even objects, which a
minute before appeared fully automatic, autonomous, and devoid of
human agents, are now made of crowds of frantically moving
humans with heavy equipment. Those who watched the Columbia
shuttle instantly transformed from the most complicated human
instrument ever assembled to a rain of debris falling over Texas will
realize how quickly objects flip-flop their mode of existence.
(Latour, 2005: 81)
14. Sociomaterial resilience
Punctualisation (Law, 1992) as a marker of success
Resilience as a response to breakdowns
Problems with ‘enrolment’ – when “translation becomes
treason, tradutore – traditore, once an enrolled entity refuses
to enter the actor-world” (Callon, 1986: 25)
Reconfiguring the ‘actor-world’ by bringing in alternative
actants to achieve equivalent or comparable ends
‘Heterogeneous re-engineering’
Institutions as well as individuals involved in this process
(Law, 1992)
15. Revisiting ‘combat’
I feel like, also that Google is equally watching you. You know,
they’re all watching you, they’re all trying to sell you things, and
the thing is not, I don’t so much mind being bombarded with
advertising as I mind having things put about me on things like
Facebook that I don’t want. You know, I don’t want my friends
to spy on me, I don’t want my friends to know what I listen to
on YouTube. (Sally Interview 1)
Use of different – and parallel – email accounts to create
boundaries around strands of life
Working around the (treasonous) agency of technology, not
removing it (re-engineer the network, not the ‘black box’ of
Googlemail)
16. Revisiting ‘coping’
University
Library
A printer that only
prints single-sided
Desks
Limited budget
Another university
Desktop computer
Electronic
resources
A girlfriend
Another desktop
Her password
A printer that prints double-sided
17. Conclusions
Resilience as an elusive but pervasive issue
A disconnect from a long tradition of work (…in other
settings)
Visible in interesting ways in the context of the digital
university
Sociomaterial ideas as a possible bridge between different
areas of work, and of theorising agency (resilience as
achieving a social success, rather than a personal, internal
characteristic)
Resilience through re-engineering: can institutions provide
resources and infrastructure that are easier to enroll?
18. References
Barnett, R. (2007) A will to learn: being a student in an age of uncertainty. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill
Education.
Bergman, M., Gross, J. P., Berry, M., & Shuck, B. (2014). If Life Happened but a Degree Didn’t:
Examining Factors That Impact Adult Student Persistence. The Journal of Continuing Higher
Education, 62 (2), 90-101.
Brown, J. (2004) Resilience: emerging social constructions in educational policy, research, and
practice. In Waxman. H., Padrón, Y., & Gray, J. (eds) Educational Resiliency: Student, teacher and school
perspectives, 11-36. Greenwich, CO: Information Age Publishing.
Callon, M. (1986) Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops
and Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Law, J. (ed) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of
Knowledge?, 196-223. London: Routledge.
Cornford, J. & Pollock, N. (2002) The university campus as ‘resourceful constraint’: process and
practice in the construction of the virtual university. In Lea, M. & Nicoll, K. (eds), Distributed
learning: Social and Cultural Approaches to Practice, 170-181. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Crook, C. (2002) The campus experience of networked learning. In Networked learning: Perspectives
and issues, 293-308. London: Springer.
19. References
Duckworth, A. & Gross, J. (2014) Self-Control and Grit: Related but Separable Determinants of
Success. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23 (5), 319-325.
Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. & Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing
the Sociomaterial. London: Routledge.
Gourlay, L. (2012) Cyborg ontologies and the lecturer’s voice: a posthuman reading of the ‘face-to-
face’. Learning, Media and Technology 37 (2), 198-211.
Gourlay, L., & Oliver, M. (2012) Curating, combat or coping? Student entanglements with
technologies in HE. Paper presented at Society for Research into Higher Education 2012, Wales.
Hall, R. & Winn, J. (2011) Questioning Technology in the Development of a Resilient Higher
Education. E–Learning and Digital Media, 8 (4), 343-356.
Howard, S., Dryden, J. & Johnson, B. (1999) Childhood Resilience: Review and Critique of
Literature. Oxford Review of Education 25 (3): 307–23.
Jones, C., & Healing, G. (2010). Networks and locations for student learning. Learning, Media and
Technology, 35 (4), 369-385.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
20. References
Law, J. (1992) Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity.
Systems Practice, 5 (4): 379–393.
Ross, J., Gallagher, M. & Macleod, H. (2013) Making distance visible: assembling nearness in an
online distance learning programme. International Review of Research in Online and Distance Learning,
14 (4), 51-66.
Silva, R. & Radigan, J. (2004) Achieving success: an agentic model of resiliency. In Waxman. H.,
Padrón, Y., & Gray, J. (eds) Educational Resiliency: Student, teacher and school perspectives, 113-136.
Greenwich, CO: Information Age Publishing.
Tinto, V. (1997) Colleges as communities: Taking research on student persistence seriously. The
review of higher education, 21 (2), 167-177.
Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice. London:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013) Digital resilience in higher education. European Journal of Open,
Distance and E-Learning, 16 (1), 53.
Werner, E. & Smith, R. (1982) Vulnerable but invincible: a longitudinal study of resilient children and youth.
New York: McGraw Hill.
