Abstract
In both academia and social work practice, resilience has emerged as a necessary component to thrive in a profession that presents emotionally rigorous and high-pressure demands. Resilience is the study of capabilities, processes, or outcomes denoted by positive adaptation in the context of risk or adversity. Educators provide pivotal opportunities for students to learn the practices of self-care, reflective practice, and empathy. Teaching social work students the components of perseverance and the skills needed to build resilience is extremely important; however, there is little research offering programmatic techniques and practice application for educators and practitioners. This banded dissertation seeks to answer these questions: What are best practices for teaching resilience and how can social work educators most effectively integrate resilience into social work programs? Three products are comprised in this Banded Dissertation. The first is a systematic literature review, which identified, reviewed and synthesized current material about resilience and distinguished best practices for teaching resilience. The second product is a conceptual paper that answered the following: how do educators teach resilience to emerging social work students? This paper drew insight from a systematic review and developed a teaching framework for implementation. The final product was a presentation at a professional, peer reviewed social work conference. This presentation followed the completion of the systematic review and presented the research findings.