“Seeking Resilience, Sustaining Development”: A Self-Narrative Study of Early Career English Teacher Resilience from an Ecological Perspective

Siyu Duan, Wenxiu Chu () and Honggang Liu ()
Additional contact information
Siyu Duan: School of Foreign Languages, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China
Wenxiu Chu: School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou 215009, China
Honggang Liu: School of Foreign Languages, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 16, 1-19

Abstract: Teacher resilience has been an increasingly hot topic in the booming perspective of positive psychology. It has often been conceptualized as the capacity to bounce back from teaching adversities that form in the process of dynamic and complex interaction and interconnection between teachers and the context in which they operate. However, scant attention has been paid to unveiling the fluctuation and process developmental mechanism of early career English teacher resilience, especially from an ecological perspective. A self-narrative study could serve as a bridge to understand teachers’ capacity for resilience to navigate multiple challenges, discover and reconstruct themselves and ensure recovery and development in their daily interaction with their environment. Against this backdrop, the present study adopted a self-narrative method to explore the dynamic development and influencing factors of early career English teacher resilience. Results concerning early career English teacher resilience displayed an approximate V-shaped developmental trajectory evincing a Fighting–Lying flat–Seeking balance–Fighting–Fighting transition during the early stages of an educational career. Additionally, this was affected by various personal factors (i.e., previous experience, belief, motivation and well-being) and contextual factors (i.e., students, family and colleagues) over the past five years. In light of these findings, implications are proposed for fostering early career teachers’ resilience to deal with setbacks and promoting their sustainable professional development.

Keywords: early career English teacher resilience; dynamic changes; self-narrative study; ecological perspective (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/16/12386/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/16/12386/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:16:p:12386-:d:1217674

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().