Creating understandings of relationships through video interaction guidance : an exploration of resilience

Abstract

This thesis explores resilience in an educational context and is comprised of three chapters: a systematic literature review, a bridging document and a piece of empirical research. The systematic literature review examines the views of children and teachers about the role of relationships in developing resilience in children and young people (CYP) through a meta-ethnography. The findings suggest interactions between individuals are the foundations of relationships between CYP and teachers as well as family members. These relationships and the support they provide effect how the individual child or young person makes sense of the world; how they perceive challenges and think about themselves. A model was created from these findings. The bridging document discusses my theoretical underpinnings, ontological and epistemological stance and ethical considerations of the empirical research. The bridging document aims to link the meta-ethnography and the empirical research project. The empirical research explored everyday resilience through the use of Video Interaction Guidance (VIG). It aimed to examine the following two research questions: 1. In the context of VIG, what understandings do parents, teachers and children construct about their relationships with one another? 2. What can these understandings tell us about resilience? Conceptualisation of everyday resilience through a relational lens led to an exploration of whether VIG could be used with children, parents and teachers to create a new understanding of resilience. A multiple case-study design was adopted with two triads of participants. The interviews with the participants and a selection of shared reviews from the VIG cycles were transcribed and analysed using thematic analysis. The model created through the meta-ethnography was used to guide the creation of important themes in the empirical research but new themes were also created from the data itself. The Resilience Pyramid was then created from three aspects of their relationships that stood out as being useful in thinking about everyday resilience from a relational viewpoint. The Resilience Pyramid suggests three aspects of relationships interconnect to create a new understanding of resilience. This paper concludes that it is possible to use VIG to explore teachers’, parents’ and children’s understandings of their relationships with one another and use these understandings to create a new, relational, understanding of resilience.