A Focus on Hope: Fifty Resilient Students Speak

Over the course of ten years, this extensive qualitative study focused on the academic resilience phenomenon. The research delves into the educational resilience experiences of fifty low socioeconomic students of color from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In addition to chronicling specific protective factors and processes active in the students’ lives, several symbiotic relationships between groups of protective factors are documented and explored. A Resilience Cycle theory, which was chronicled in previous works of the authors, is used as a framework to view essential elements of the students’ academic success. Ultimately, the data and findings are used to propose practical suggestions for promoting academic resilience in at-risk youth nationwide. Furthermore, because one author specializes in education and the other in psychology, both of these disciplines are brought to bear on this crucial and understudied topic.