“You’ve Always Got Challenges”: Resilience and the Preservice Teacher

Abstract

Agricultural educators hold a position that bears much responsibility to many different stakeholders and is accompanied by many forms of stressors, making a high level of resilience particularly essential to this group (Anderson, Kitchel, & Thieman, 2012; Croom, 2003; Straquadine, 1990; Torres, Lambert, & Lawver, 2009; Walker, Garton, & Kitchel, 2004). Agricultural educators continue to be in short supply in relation to demand and especially in the early years high attrition rates plague the profession (Kantrovich, 2007). The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe teacher resilience of preservice high school agricultural educators. The population studied was ten pre-service agricultural education teachers in their last year of coursework in agricultural education at the University of Missouri. The themes exposed include: youth experiences are a key component toward reflection on resilience, the uncertainty of the reality of the job could counter resilience, and belief that “doing a good job” is key to resilience in teaching. Recommendations for practice and theoretical questions for teacher educators to discuss are provided.