Unpacking Disciplinary Academic Resilience

Abstract Research on resilience over the past decades has been seeking to understand how some students manage to overcome the odds associated with exposure to adversities. Within this research field, the concept of resilience has been extensively examined, with “academic resilience” has been widely used in education to describe resilience in relation to learning and cognitive performance. At the same time, science education research has long focused on understanding and counteracting educational inequalities affecting minoritised students and has generated insights into how some students persists and succeed despite structural and social challenges. However, these issues have rarely been explicitly examined through the lens of academic resilience. This review paper therefore examines how academic resilience has been conceptualised and mobilised within science education research, and considers what a resilience framework contributes to understanding how students navigate structural barriers in learning science. Through a review of thirteen science education journals, the analysis identifies four overarching themes in the limited but emerging use of academic resilience in the field, as well as a range of resources that support students’ engagement and educational trajectories within context shaped by structural constraints. These resources are discussed in relation to how academic resilience has been operationalised within science education research, advancing a conceptualisation of academic resilience that could be potentially brings greater analytical coherence to existing research on the phenomena of “succeeding against the odds” in science education.