In this project funded by NRF-incentive funding, Prof Tinie Theron (Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities, Vaal Triangle Campus, North-West University) and I are interacting with university students who know marginalisation on account of race, sex, and/or economic disadvantage. All participating students were originally nominated to the project because peers / community members consider them to be resilient, and because they have demonstrated academic success. From their volunteered life stories, and hand-drawn reflections, we are gaining insight into the culturally- and contextually-sensitive processes that have influenced, and are influencing, their resilience. In particular, this draws attention to discourses (such as the valorisation of education – see Theron, 2015) that need to be interrogated in order to truly champion resilience.

The SISU project (co-led by Prof Kristiina Kumpulainen, Univesity of Helsinki, and Prof Linda Theron, Optentia, North-West University) investigates the social ecologies of resilience among at-risk children starting school in Finland and South Africa. It is a visual participatory study funded by the NRF (2013-2015) and the Academy of Finland. SISU contributes to the joint call on children and youth of the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Academy of Finland by increasing present day knowledge of protective processes that promote children’s resilient management of transitions to starting school. The leading objective of the research project is to explain why, and how, some at-risk South African and Finnish children make positive transitions to school. The second objective is to identify sociocultural processes embedded in the children’s social ecologies that support their successful school transitions. The third objective is to examine and further develop participatory visual research methodologies for investigating and promoting children’s resilience and positive adaptation to school. The research project is framed by the Social Ecology of Resilience theory (Ungar, 2011) which emphasizes the cultural and contextual nature of resilience (Boyden, 2003; Clauss-Ehlers & Wibrowski, 2007). In addition, the project draws on the sociocultural theories of learning and development (Forman, Minick, & Stone 1993; Wertsch, del Rio, & Alvarez, 1995) in order to understand how the funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) of children’s social ecologies support their boundary crossing (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) and positive adaptation to school. In applying visual participatory methodologies, the research project provides a nuanced understanding of sociocultural processes engendering children’s positive transitioning to school. In doing so, the study contributes to the development of culturally sensitive protective mechanisms, for the purposes of education in particular, that potentially increase children’s socio-emotional well-being and enable young learners both in South Africa and Finland to overcome inequalities and risk of marginalization.