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What does it mean to make an educational initiative resilient and, thereby, more inclusive?
Sport! OP! Opportunities for inclusion of vulnerable youth through sport What does it mean to make an educational initiative resilient and, thereby, more inclusive?
The concept of resiliency comes from the field of engineering, where it is used to describe a property of certain materials that, after being subjected to particular distortions, are able to return to their original state. From that starting point, a range of different fields, such as education and the social sphere, have adopted this construct of resiliency and adapted it for their own purposes (Nussbaum, 2011), considering it as a framework of reference focusing on the positive aspects and processes that define a person, group, material or system that allow it to endure a destabilising and disruptive event or situation that affects its integrity and stability, enabling it to withstand and overcome the event, recover and even come back stronger (Vaquero, Urrea and Mundet, 2014). In this respect, if we apply this concept to the case of organisations running socioeducational initiatives, such as the clubs participating in the Sport!Op! project, the applicability of the construct of resiliency does not refer to an individual characteristic of a person, but rather in the sense of making the organisation a potentially more resilient institution, adopting specific strategies concretes in relation to its own nature as a defender or ally of vulnerable groups, and the resources available to them for this purpose (Bartley et al. 2007; Cabanyes, 2010; Guerra, 2013; Masten & Obradovic, 2006; Cabanyes 2010).
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Hence, we can identify the following two key factors that link resiliency with social inclusion:
Being exposed to an environment characterised by risk and/or adverse circumstances.
Understanding resiliency as a process in which the interactions between people take centre stage. These interactions are dynamic and changing, so resiliency as applied to the social context is not a static concept or individual characteristic, but rather a response to a proposal for action and interaction.
