ABSTRACT
The seemingly ubiquitous term ‘resilience’ has entered the lexicon of higher education, primarily through claims that undergraduate students ‘lack resilience’ and must begin to exhibit an as yet undefined characteristic considered to be required within higher education and workplace environments. ‘Resilience’ might be defined in a number of ways – ‘bouncing back’, coping (or even thriving) in situations of adversity, overcoming and learning from challenges – but for the purposes of this chapter resilience is considered an umbrella term covering an individual’s contextualised behaviours, decisions and strategies. Through this prism, resilience is regarded as dependent not only upon that individual, but also upon the external (environmental) factors which that person encounters over the course of their lifetime. This interpretation of resilience is founded upon a range of literature, much of which focuses upon resilience as something which is malleable and open to influence by those ‘internal’ and ‘external’ factors, such as self-care strategies, motivations, optimism, relationships and access to formal and informal support systems.
This chapter explores the findings from a year-long research project which examined second year undergraduate student levels of resilience across six disciplines – including law – within one British University. In reflecting upon and seeking to explain similarities and differences seen in responses to academic and personal challenges between students in the law site and others, the chapter focuses specifically upon the past, present and future professional and personal identities of the law students, and the implications such identities have for their well-being.
