Academic resilience in first-generation Latina/o students

ABSTRACT

The transition to college, combined with abrupt changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic and online learning, has increased challenges for first-year college students. Resilience theory, defined as the study of how people rebound from adversity, can help us understand how students triumph over challenges during an unprecedented time of change and uncertainty. Through narrative interview techniques and analysis of campus survey data, this qualitative study examines the meanings and experiences of academic resilience among seven first-generation Latina/o students in their first semester at University of California, Merced. Five female and two male participants were interviewed at the mid-point and at the end of their first semester of college. Connection to their environment, not fearing failure, agency, self-efficacy, and survival captured participants' meanings associated with resilience. The themes of connecting, helping, and storytelling summarize how students make meaning and experience academic resilience, engage in protective processes, and navigate mid-semester adversities and interventions. They also communicate the dynamic, situational, and process orientation of academic resilience. How students positively adapt to academic difficulty as they begin their college career provides a rich understanding of resilience. These understandings can be used to structure systems and processes that activate academic resilience habits early in a student's college experience. Building a strengths-based curriculum featuring first-year success courses, living learning communities, job and internship opportunities, and reflective experiences are key recommendations for policy and practice resulting from this study. This author posits reciprocal resilience as a systems-based model where members both contribute to and benefit from the collective persistence of their community. Future research on the responding and harmonizing actions between connecting, helping, and storytelling themes can enhance the understandings of reciprocating relationships that activate resilience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)