Resilience

Pedagogy Oct 2025

Emily Rónay Johnston

Abstract

Abstract Since March 2020, terms like resilient course design, resilient pedagogy, pandemic resilience, and keep teaching have become ubiquitous in higher education. In response to COVID-19, institutions have proselytized about bouncing back. However, what many may have internalized as a survival response to “the unprecedented” — resilience — is intrinsic to what many in English studies teach: the writing process. Writing is an exercise in resilience. To write is to think. To think is to reckon with complexity. And that reckoning requires that one abandons, however momentarily, the illusion of control for the possibility of creating something new. Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship on resilience in critical pedagogy and composition and rhetoric, this article works to normalize resilience in the writing process and in the teaching of First-Year Composition (FYC). In doing so, the article redefines resilience as a rhetorical tool: a flexibility of mindset and moves that student-writers may develop as they encounter different writing situations and reflect on how they navigate those situations, which can guide them in making strategic choices about languaging, in and beyond our classrooms.

Journal: Pedagogy
Published: 2025-10-01
DOI: 10.1215/15314200-11874335
Open Access: Closed
Topics: first-year composition curriculum design multimodality multilingual writers affect and writing

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Cites in this index (3)

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The Teaching for Transfer Curriculum: The Role of Concurrent Transfer and Insid…

College Composition and Communication
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Pedagogy
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College Composition and Communication

Also cites 5 works outside this index ↓

DiGrazia (2012)

No One Wants to Go There: Resilience, Denial, and Possibilities for Queering the Writing …

↗
Flynn (2012)

Feminist Rhetorical Resilience

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Menary (2007)

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Language Sciences ↗
Vasquez (2022)

‘Stop Complaining, You Just Need More Resilience:’ Racial Gaslighting as ‘Othering.’

Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis ↗
Yancey (2014)

Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing

↗

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Resilience

Abstract

Citation Context

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Cites in this index (3)

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