Cultural perspectives in building education system resilience in the Pacific

• In Event: Regional perspectives on education system resilience: Insights from the Pacific, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean

Proposal

Around the world, resilience has become a buzzword in the wake of COVID-19. Yet, the concept of resilience in relation to education systems is not well defined or understood across different contexts. Policy frameworks frequently equate it with disaster preparedness, risk management, or the capacity of institutions to adapt to shocks. While these elements are vital, they reflect a technical orientation that risks overlooking the deeper cultural, relational, and spiritual dimensions that shape how communities experience and sustain resilience.

The Pacific offers a critical vantage point for rethinking resilience in education. Small island states face some of the world’s most pressing challenges: rising seas, intensifying cyclones, limited resources, and geographic isolation. In these contexts, resilience cannot be understood merely as a technical capacity to withstand shocks. Instead, it is deeply bound to Indigenous worldviews that emphasise relationality, reciprocity, and balance with the environment. For Pacific peoples, resilience is not about “bouncing back” to a pre-crisis state; it is about sustaining continuity across generations, preserving cultural integrity, and ensuring collective well-being. This holistic view of education continuity encompasses the education system, policies, school leaders, teachers, infrastructure, resources, and capacity, all understood within the context of Pacific values and ways of knowing (Cameron et al., 2024; Reyes, 2013; Shah, 2019).

This presentation draws on literature on resilience in education, alongside Pacific scholarship and Indigenous epistemologies, to reconceptualise resilience from a Pacific perspective. It foregrounds three key insights. First, resilience is inherently collective. It is nurtured not through isolated institutions but through networks of kinship, extended families, and communities that share responsibility for learning, safety, and survival. Second, resilience is cyclical and intergenerational. Rather than a linear process of recovery, it is experienced as an ongoing cycle of adaptation and continuity, informed by ancestral knowledge and cultural practices. Third, resilience is ecological and spiritual. Pacific traditions insist that human survival and flourishing depend on harmonious relationships with land, ocean, and spirit, and these elements are inseparable from how education is conceived.

These insights expand on the dominant global framings of resilience in at least two ways. They resist the tendency to treat resilience as a checklist of technical fixes such as emergency protocols, digital infrastructure, or institutional reforms. Instead, they reveal resilience as a lived practice, expressed in rituals, storytelling, and collective rebuilding after disasters. They also insist that resilience must be tied to equity and inclusion. In aid-dependent and vulnerable contexts, overlooking Indigenous voices and values risks reproducing dependency rather than building true resilience. The focus of this presentation is on reframing the merits and challenges of resilience as a culturally grounded and socially inclusive process that has the transformative potential to build enduring peaceful societies. This reframing not only provides cultural legitimacy to resilience discourse in the Pacific region but also enriches comparative and international education scholarship within a multi-regional dialogue alongside perspectives from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia.

Authors

• Krishneel Reddy, Pacific Community

• Elizabeth Anne Cassity, Australian Council for Educational Research