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Hello.
[SOUND] For many years in resilience research and practice,
the themes of culture and society were relatively neglected.
But that's not true any more.
Some of the most exciting, new horizons for research on resilience in
children are focused on the cultural or societal level.
There's a rising interest globally in
understanding the role of culture in resilience.
And also in planning interventions and
programs with cultural differences in mind.
Culture can have many influences,
as we've already talked about on developmental tasks.
But also different cultures have different practices, and rituals and
belief systems, that play a protective rule in their culture, and
have evolved over the millenia, to protect people practicing that culture.
And what we're seeing is a surge of interest and understanding,
cultural differences and similarities, and how these cultural practices
work to protect child development and promote resilience and adversity.
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There's a lot of interest worldwide in res, the potential of immigrant youth.
There's a lot of migration around the world of children and young people.
And it is important for
receiving societies to understand and promote their well being and
success because the success of the society in many countries is depending more and
more on the success of immigrant and refugee children.
How do we foster resilience in immigrant youth?
How do we retain the capacity, adaptive capacity that
immigrant children bring to a new country and their,
in terms of their language, their culture, and their families?
How do we build those resources to not only promote the resilience of
the individual immigrant or refugee child, but
also to promote the resilience of the communities and societies where they live?
How do we restore cultural practices that are really crucial for
child and family development in the aftermath of disaster?
We talked quite a bit about that in the unit on disaster, and
there's important work going on trying to understand that and
different centers and research projects.
Also, there's tremendous interest in learning more about how to
mobilize cultural and societal strengths in order to support and
promote positive child development.
This is happening among researchers and it's also happening among humanitarian and
governmental agencies who are very invested in the future resil,
the resilience of children, because that represents their future.
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There's also a great deal of interest in learning how to
tailor interventions to culture.
We know that it's important to be sensitive to cultural differences.
This goes back to the idea of one size does not fit all.
You have to consider a cultural context when you're developing and
implementing efforts to promote resilience in children.
And you have to also understand the role of culture when you're trying to
study the basic nature of resilience.
But there's particularly interest in how to build into our
interventions the, the strengths and potential of cultures.
How do we align our interventions so that the capacities and
strengths of a particular culture are working for
the intervention and for positive child development.
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Many cultures, one school is the motto of
one of our local high schools here in the city where I live.
And in this school, there are many diverse children.
Because in our community,
there are many immigrants from generations of migration into the community.
So, the school is very, very diverse.
And I think that motto captures what, very nicely, what they're trying to do.
They want to have a very positive school climate where everybody feels that
they belong and they can achieve, at the same time,
recognizing cultural diversity and differences.
And I think schools in communities with a lot of cultural diversity play a very
special role in fostering not only opportunities for
children from different backgrounds, but fostering and
helping children learn about cultural differences and
how children from different groups can get along with each other.
Changing intergroup attitudes, and interactions.
Schools can also support and maintain the multiple language skills
that children from different cultures bring to their communities and societies.
And schools have long played a role.
And increasingly play a role in citizenship and now we have young
people who need to become global citizens and schools will play a role in that.
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Finally, I want to mention the importance of global learning and research networks.
Because of the interest in cultural diversity and
the different ways that societies can promote resilience and
take culture into account, there's a lot of interest in creating networks
of researchers, networks of, of program and service providers and
learning networks to put together what we know and link people around the globe
who are trying to promote resilience in different kinds of situations.
And I just wanted to share this example, the Resilience Research Center,
which is located in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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Is led by Michael Ungar and many other wonderful scholars.
And this center not only operates
research projects around the world linking researchers together, but
they also provide a learning community.
For trying to understand the role of cultures and societies in resilience,
and I want to direct you to their website, and I suggest that you watch the video,
called Supporting Youth Resilience, it's very short, about two and a half minutes.
And it's a,
you know, tells a very powerful story about resilience in diverse cultures.
You can also learn on their website all the different kinds of
things they're doing.
Different research projects, and different ways that they're trying to
understand the role of culture and resilience.
And I just wanted to share with you one of their infographics.
This is available if you want to download it from their website.
It's this is the first page of two pages and what you
can just see here this is actually what's portrayed in the little video.
It's what they're trying to convey is how you know,
youth resilience grows and develops over time from, from nurturing,
from the strength that draws from the environment, from many other systems that
play a role in the growth and development of healthy trees.
But that's part of it, and here's the rest of their infographic.
And I just would encourage you to learn more about
the Resilience Research Center and everything that they do.
Another example of network for resilience and learning about resilience and
sharing what works is called CORELAC, and the mission this is it Coalition for
the Resilience of Children and you in Latin America and the Caribbean.
And this group also has a website where you can learn about their activities.
Their mission is disaster risk reduction.
And they're trying to work together in a community of service providers and
scholars to try to build knowledge and do a better job in reducing
the risk of children and youth exposed to various kinds of disasters.
And this is just another example of how coalitions and
networks of scholars and investigators and government and
non-government agencies are coming together to try to learn together and
work together to promote resilience in young people around the world.
[SOUND]
Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LPRegents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development
