Why ethics, relationality and meaning‐making matter to resilience education: Initiatives from global disaster contexts

Abstract

Education is widely positioned in international policy frameworks as a mechanism for fostering agency in young people to promote resilience in their communities, including in the United Nation's Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction. However, educational responses to disaster risk, emanating from natural hazards, frequently emphasise technical preparedness over attention to the socially contextualised and ethical dimensions of education. Drawing on Gert Biesta's distinctions between three core functions of education (qualification, socialisation and subjectification), and Paul Ricoeur's understanding of relational identity as ‘Oneself as Another’, we propose novel socialised forms of education that foster meaningful resilience. Data were obtained through deliberative discussions with disaster education programme implementers and education scholars in Japan, Indonesia and the United States and analysed through interpretive phenomenological analysis. Three core themes are identified as framing a socialised form of resilience education: (1) orienting education towards communal experiences of disaster, (2) fostering a critical consciousness grounded in empathy and (3) honouring culturally situated interpretations of disaster. Our findings show that socialised approaches to education offer unique insights into how concepts of risk, resilience and agency are interpreted across social and cultural contexts. We argue that attending to these socialised conceptualisations enable a higher quality of resilience education: promoting ethically grounded, culturally responsive and socially situated forms of agency more akin to a ‘futures thinking’ approach that also serves to reposition education's core functions beyond standardised ‘technical fixes’.

Rationale for this study: Around the world, approaches to disaster education commonly focus on knowledge transmission about risks and technical solutions, for example through drills and training packages. This research differs by advocating for closer consideration of the possibilities afforded by socialised approaches to education that foster meaningful resilience within and across diverse cultural contexts.

Why the new findings matter: Findings from deliberative discussions with disaster education programme implementers and education scholars from a range of social and cultural contexts show that socialised approaches offer unique insights into how concepts of risk, resilience and agency are interpreted.

Implications for education researchers, policy makers and disaster practitioners: Relational and socialised forms of education can generate an ethic of care in learners in ways that drills cannot. Incorporating the local community into the learning space can generate empathy for the community and its members too. Findings show that educative practices involving participation and dialogical processes—which place learners, teachers, disaster practitioners and community members on a level playing field rather than in a hierarchy—afford mutually reinforcing learning exchanges. These exchanges can motivate action through a collective sense of social and cultural identity. Education researchers, policy makers and disaster practitioners should explore ways to better support socialised and relational forms of education for resilience to move us from individualised safety awareness towards mutually derived social goals.