Guidelines for promoting organisational resilience in South African schools

Sustaining educator resilience is increasingly important in transitional societies which have a higher risk for dysfunction from coping with adjustments to emerging organisational practices with no local precedent. This would be the case for South African schools that have weathered transition in their organisational climate the past two decades. Our critical review aimed to survey the evidence on educator resilience within the school setting to inform the South African education system. For this critical review, we searched Business Insights - Essentials; Expanded Academic ASAP; PsycINFO; Academic Search Premier; OAlster; ERIC; Regional Business News; MasterFILE Premier; Teacher Reference Center; Newspaper Source; SocINDEX with Full Text; Health Source - Nursing/Academic Edition; Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts; Africa-Wide Information; and Google Scholar for publications on school educator resilience since 2008. We included scientific literature that focused on organisational resilience within the school context by reviewing certain keywords (title, abstract, and/or full text). Conference proceedings and studies published in other languages than English were excluded. The search initially yielded 740 research studies of which 12 were finally extracted for thematic analysis. Four main themes emerged: importance of leadership; improving school climate/culture; creating a supportive work environment; and ethics of care. The findings suggest a circular model for school organisational resilience premised in interdependent relationships between each of the extracted themes. Future studies should seek to apply this conceptual model to study education resilience in South African schools prior to wider adoption and dissemination.