Published in "Tevel Spirit" in Hebrew, on 10.2.26
Sharon Michaeli-Ramon leads the School for Nature, Environment and Society in Tel Aviv–Jaffa. She develops pedagogy and guidance in the areas of learning in real-world spaces, literacy and critical thinking, activism and education for action, and movement-based learning. She is a Lieutenant Colonel (res.) and an expert in emergency situations and establishing educational frameworks in crisis zones. She is a graduate of the first cohort of the Tevel Program.
"Resilience, at its origin, is a concept from ecology — concerned with habitats — and from there it was borrowed into the social world. In my view, resilience is a combination of flexibility, a clear internal backbone, and a narrative, which is the organizing thread that holds everything together. This structure holds true at the individual level as well as at the level of a group or organization. To these three components, two additional important parameters are added: durability and the ability to persevere through difficulty."
The Three Components of Resilience
Resilience does not exist only in emergencies and trauma. It is a constant state that reflects a person's ability to function in the face of challenge, change, and uncertainty. If we want to educate and grow teams and students with resilience, all the components mentioned above are required within every type of engagement — social, emotional, and academic. Even when working on a complex text, I need to activate mechanisms of self-criticism, perseverance, and literacy comprehension, and then create a dialogue between the learner and the text.
What is a narrative? Every person has a personal narrative, conscious or latent. A narrative also exists at the group level, according to its purpose. In a classroom, for example, the teacher builds the narrative together with the students: who we are, what we love and want, what kind of class we are. For example — we are a class that loves sports, we are curious, we help each other. When there is a class narrative, it empowers and provides a sense of uniqueness. This is our class backbone.
A narrative does not need to be built in opposition to another person or group, but rather from within what I want to be. When an "oppositional" narrative is built, resilience becomes fragile.
The process of building resilience is not unique to advisory periods and cannot be addressed only during special events, peak days, or moments of crisis. Resilience-building processes must be part of the school's routine. Resilience exists at all levels: relationships among students, among staff members, between teacher and students, with the community and families — and even gender dynamics carry weight here. If any one of these levels is ignored, we fail the goal. Everything is connected to everything.
The Ability to Be Both/And
Resilience, as noted, is connected to an internal backbone — knowing what I want and making my voice heard. For example, in my classroom I speak in the feminine grammatical form. It is interesting to note that girls actually take longer to adapt to these language changes than boys do. In general, society — across its different segments — sends messages, often unconsciously, that can suppress girls and lead them toward self-abandonment. They are accustomed to the fact that they are not always listened to. For instance, in a math lesson where girls don't always raise their hands, I as a teacher can decide to alternate giving the floor to a boy and a girl. Or if a boy interrupts a girl while she's speaking, I can stop it. Not to position girls in a vulnerable place, but to raise awareness that everyone has a voice, that the treatment is equal. I teach that there is no difference between boys and girls, and that differences between people do not define them — they are merely part of who they are.
The ability to be "both/and" is part of social resilience. The world today is highly dichotomous — everything is black or white, right or wrong. In such a state, the ability to find the middle ground is nearly zero. But when I have a complex and non-absolute identity (a woman, an Israeli, a leftist, a leader, a Lieutenant Colonel, an athlete), I am a stronger person.
Strengthening Parents
Over the past decade, we have seen a decline in the ability of the family unit to be a meaningful space in all its aspects for children. This happens due to livelihood pressures, leisure culture, the social and security situation in Israel, and more. The state, welfare services, and schools are trying to fill this gap. But is it the school's role to build children's resilience? Does a school — which already responds to a wide range of students' needs — truly have the capacity to educate them in the face of the home's power, which, even if it holds challenges, will always be the essential foundation for children? I am not sure the answer is yes. In my view, it is more important to strengthen families than to continue "outsourcing." Parents need to be given tools so they can take responsibility for their children's resilience.
Israel is a strong country, a welfare state, and within that, it is a country where the third sector fills in the gaps where needed. There are a million and a half people in Israel living on the social-Israeli periphery, below the poverty line; in addition, there is the Arab community, and families of high socioeconomic status who are not home for most of the day, and more. The work of building children's resilience must be a subject of public conversation — not the exclusive domain of schools alone, or of private actors alone. This topic certainly deserves deeper discussion, though the scope of this interview allows only this much.
Teachers' Resilience is Also Eroding
The Israeli education system does not invest enough in cultivating individuals who can cope with challenges, including learning boundaries, the ability to persevere, critical thinking, decision-making, and non-conformism. Resilience is, in fact, the opposite of conformism. It is the ability to express an opinion, to articulate disagreement in a rational way.
The Israeli education system has been in a dramatic crisis for seven to eight years, and regrettably, it does not appear it will emerge from the current crisis stronger. For there to be systemic resilience, all parts of the system must be strengthened. Yet in the current crisis, teachers' resilience is being eroded — their ability to meet their personal and family needs has been damaged. The result could be a mass exodus of teachers. There are ways to raise resilience through intensive teamwork, but flexibility is also required from the environment, the community, and the local authority, all of which must provide support.
The staffing structure of educational teams, the social status of the profession, and above all the narrative that we, as female educators, will shape, are the best chance for creating change in the system.
Creating Certainty in a State of Uncertainty
In my past, I established schools and kindergartens in refugee camps or in neighborhoods destroyed by disasters. I had to build a routine for children within the chaos and create certainty in a state of uncertainty.
It begins with identifying a team and starting training. In practice, a school can exist under a tree, in a tent, or in a building. A school is really the sum of the actions that take place — it doesn't matter for how many hours or whether it operates in shifts. This requires flexibility and depends on the needs of the place, the psychosocial needs, and also the wellbeing of parents.
When I provide a response for children in disaster zones (including emergencies), it frees up the parents. In a certain sense, the parents here are essentially a "captive audience," and this fact allows us to be a healing space for them as well. They come to school anyway, or are invited to activities with their child, and there is real potential for communication with them. We can, for example, pass along relevant and focused information and expand the resilience to the level of the whole community.
Key Insights:
Resilience includes three components: flexibility, backbone, and narrative. These are joined by two parameters — the ability to persevere through difficulty and the ability to function amid change and uncertainty. A strong and stable backbone does not change in the face of crisis but displays great flexibility under unexpected circumstances. It is important that the narrative be positive, provide a sense of belonging and uniqueness, and not be oppositional — that is, the narrative should be based on "who I am" and "who I want to be," not defined against someone or another group.
The central purpose of school is learning. Resilience is part of the school's educational work and is also built through pedagogical engagement with meaningful academic challenges. The two additional goals of school — developing social understanding and capabilities, and emotional development — inherently contain built-in resilience.
Resilience in school is present at every level — in the academic and social dimension, the personal and the classroom, toward students and staff alike, on routine days and in times of crisis.
Resilience is in fact the opposite of conformism. It is connected to one's ability to form a position, to express one's voice, to agree and to disagree. Therefore, resilience is also linked to gender dimensions and requires us to empower a vision of equality — one in which differences between people do not define them but are simply part of who they are. It encourages "both/and" thinking and grants legitimacy to identity and social complexity.
School as a resilience center — the school must nurture resilience, but it should not replace the family unit. The school can amplify the capacities of parents and the wider community, while at the same time the resilience of the school and its teachers rests, in part, on the flexibility and support of the environment and community.
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