There are words we often hear thrown around in the news, in research and in conversation, and resilience is certainly one of those recently. But what does is really mean? And how should we be considering it in practice within early years? I undertook some research last year with multiagency professionals to explore just that. What I found was that we all conceptualise resilience in our own way – and so we must consider how it is relevant to our roles and responsibilities.
The word ‘resilience’ is said to derive from the Latin verb resalire, meaning to ‘jump back’ (Mukherjee and Kumar 2017). Throughout the course of my research, I came to define the term as: the ability to overcome negative circumstances or occurrences and maintain healthy functioning, both on an individual level and within the contexts of social environments.
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