Module at a glance
Academic resilience is an online interactive module about stress and well-being, and guides learners toward identifying and controlling their own habitual responses to daily stresses. The goal of this module is to implement stress awareness and academic resilience training for HQP in post-secondary learning environments. Using videos, interactive activities, and reflection exercises, the module supports students as they explore traits that foster academic resilience, persistence, and self-directedness.
The module guides students through what goes on in their bodies and brains when they are stressed, why they might be responding to stress in certain ways, allows them to reflect on the progress they’ve already made during their academic career, and explores evidence-based strategies they can start using today to further develop their own academic resilience.
In the module, we also address important social concepts related to resilience, most notably in what contexts it is inappropriate to ask for resilience from individuals – such as from individuals in equity-deserving groups facing oppression of basic human rights.
The module contains five sections with concepts that scaffold throughout its progression. As such, it is advised that the concepts be completed in the order they are presented.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- 1Explain the importance of stress for survival and differentiate between acute (i.e. adaptive) and chronic (i.e. damaging) stress.
- 2Describe the stress response in plain language and identify one’s habitual response to stress.
- 3Define resilience and describe its relationship with stress and stress response.
- 4Identify and describe specific skills related to resilience that can help us frame and face stress.
- 5Practice developing skills relating to reliance via selected course activities.
Module structure
The skills and tools that you learn from this module are not just applicable to graduate school, but also every aspect of your life. Planning personal vacations, home repairs, and so forth can all incorporate aspects of project management.
This module contains a detailed overview of project management principles and may complement some skills you already employ to manage your projects!
A final note before we get started:
We must remember that resilience isn’t just about individual behaviours. Resilience is systemic. It’s about the support systems you have in place in addition to your own behaviour, although in this module, we are focusing on your own behaviour and things you can control. In addition to your personal resilience, there is your social system, research environment, local community, country, and global community, all of which impact individual resilience.
Although this is a bigger issue than we can tackle in this brief module, we want to acknowledge that building resilience isn’t just about changes you make to ‘work on yourself’. So, later in the module we will ask you to reflect on how some of the systems around you can support your resilience. What needs do you have as a learner, as a community member, in a research group, or as part of a social group? How can your leaders, supervisors, mentors, and surrounding institutions support you to ensure your optimal growth and resilience in the face of moderate, tolerable stressors? In the end, we all form the system, which means we can all contribute to being part of this change.