Call For Papers for School Psychology International

Special Issue: Resilience to COVID-19 challenges: Lessons for school psychologists serving school-attending youth with experiences of marginalisation

 

Guest editors: Dr Anastassios Matsopoulos (University of Crete, Greece) and Dr Linda Theron (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

 

Natural and other disasters have shown researchers and practitioners how important it is to understand child and adolescent capacity for resilience from a systemic or social-ecological perspective. From this perspective, resilience is facilitated by resources within individual young people and their social and physical ecologies (Masten et al., 2021; Ungar & Theron, 2019). Put differently, whilst individual resources will always matter for resilience, they do not fully account for young people’s positive outcomes when their exposure to stress is high. The COVID-19 pandemic, and its skewed impacts on people whom society typically marginalises, is no exception: positive outcomes are more likely when young people have access to social and ecological resources (Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2020). To that end, there have been calls for greater attention to the resilience-enabling contributions of families, peer groups, schools and other community-based organisations, mental health practitioners and other service providers, legislation and other government-facilitated, cultural beliefs, and the physical environment (Fouché et al., 2020; Holmes et al., 2020). In the absence of more systemic accounts of what supports positive outcomes for children and adolescents who are vulnerable to marginalisation and COVID-19, school psychologists and other service providers will struggle to optimally champion child and adolescent resilience.