Building Resilience for Early Years Teachers

AbstractWorking in Early Childhood Education and Care presents particular demands for teachers’ resilience. Helping pre-service teachers to explore strategies to respond to challenges in the supportive learning environment of pre-service learning is important to building strength and resilience for teachers’ careers. In this endeavour, the BRiTE (Building Resilience in Teacher Education) online modules have been integrated across an Early Years degree at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Students complete one or more modules in relevant subjects, with the full suite of modules completed twice in the course of their degree. Integration in subjects includes activities responding to, or building on knowledge from a module. Ongoing research has involved interviewing students about challenges in their progress, and ways the BRiTE modules have assisted them in responding to these challenges. This has shown the value our students see in BRiTE, and has helped us to regularly monitor and make changes to the links between the modules and subjects in the degree.