Exploring Children's Lived Experience of Resilience in Public Preschools in Taiwan: The Lens of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory

The importance of resilience in young children is paramount as it helps them adjust to their life difficulties. Whilst extensive empirical studies have focused on students and adults’ resilience, there has been relatively little attention to the development of children’s resilience during their early years. Although the concept of resilience and most of the protective and risk factors have primarily been investigated in Western literature, little is known about the understanding of resilience in non-Western cultures. Ungar (2008, 2012) has constantly emphasised the important influence of cultures and contexts on resilience research. There has also been a lack of knowledge surrounding the concept of developing resilience in theory and practice in Taiwan. This study sought to narrow these gaps in the knowledge of resilience. This study focuses on the power of storytelling as an effective preschool pedagogy in order to facilitate the development of children’s resilience. The purpose of this narrative study is to explore preschoolers’ lived experience of resilience in the public preschools in Taiwan, through the engagement of teachers’ storytelling in relation to resilience-orientated stories. In order to fully understand these lived experiences, this study uses Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory as a theoretical framework to analyse the potentially reflexive influence of social and contextual elements on individual preschoolers’ experiences of developing resilience. This study was undertaken in a narrative approach as a methodology to capture preschoolers’ lived experiences in relation to resilience. There were five preschoolers selected from three public preschools in Taiwan. Two analytical frameworks were adopted to analyse the multiple methods of data collection that included classroom observations; children, teachers and parents’ interviews; children’s documents; and my own research field notes. Firstly, to explore preschoolers’ narratives of resilience, the analytical framework was developed from ...