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Using Literacy to Build Resilience We believe it’s most effective to incorporate the resilience-promoting skills into the instruction and activities that are already happening throughout your school day. For example, you can use math instruction to foster persistence and problem- solving. History can be a great vehicle for building empathy and perspective-taking. In science class, forming a hypothesis, testing, evaluating, and drawing conclusions are all connected to executive function. But for us, literacy instruction is the most extraordinary vehicle for developing resilience-promoting skills. On a fundamental level, narrative and storytelling are essential to the human condition (Green et al., 2006). Having a sense of origin, of beginning, middle, and end, helps define where we come from, who we are, and where we are going. On a developmental level, literacy can help children develop self-awareness, emotional skills, and empathy. Reading about the lives of characters
Kids Demonstrating Resilience: The I Survived Series Few children’s book series provide clearer
about these books and how the young people featured in them demonstrated the skills needed to survive such challenging experiences.
examples of resilience among young people than author Lauren Tarshis’s popular I Survived series. These stories from history, some in graphic novel form and many available in Spanish, feature young characters whose resilience gets them through some of the most memorable and terrifying events in history, including the destruction of Pompeii in 79 CE, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, the 1967 attack of the Grizzlies, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and many more. Check the Scholastic website to read more
Chapter 1 • What Is Resilience? 29
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