Journal article
Why ethics, relationality and meaning-making matter to resilience education: Initiatives from global disaster contexts
Review of education, Vol.14(2), pp.1-28
08/2026
Appears in Recent Faculty of Education Publications
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Abstract
Education is widely positioned in international policy frameworks as a mechanism for fostering agency in young people to promote resilience in their communities, including in the United Nation's Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction. However, educational responses to disaster risk, emanating from natural hazards, frequently emphasise technical preparedness over attention to the socially contextualised and ethical dimensions of education. Drawing on Gert Biesta's distinctions between three core functions of education (qualification, socialisation and subjectification), and Paul Ricoeur's understanding of relational identity as ‘Oneself as Another’, we propose novel socialised
forms of education that foster meaningful resilience. Data were obtained through deliberative discussions with disaster education programme implementers and education scholars in Japan, Indonesia and the United States and analysed through interpretive phenomenological analysis. Three core themes are identified as framing a socialised form of resilience education: (1) orienting education towards communal experiences of disaster, (2) fostering a critical consciousness grounded in empathy and (3) honouring culturally situated interpretations of disaster. Our findings show that socialised approaches to education offer unique insights into how concepts of risk, resilience and agency are interpreted across social and cultural contexts. We argue that attending to these socialised conceptualisations enable a higher quality of resilience education: promoting ethically grounded, culturally responsive and socially situated forms of agency more akin to a ‘futures thinking’ approach that also serves to reposition education's core functions beyond standardised ‘technical fixes’.
Details
- Title
- Why ethics, relationality and meaning-making matter to resilience education: Initiatives from global disaster contexts
- Creators
- Belinda Jane Davis - Monash UniversityAlan Reid - Monash UniversityIlan Kelman - University College London
- Publication Details
- Review of education, Vol.14(2), pp.1-28
- Publisher
- Wiley; HOBOKEN
- Grant note
- Open access publishing facilitated by Monash University, as part of the Wiley - Monash University agreement via the Council of Australasian University Librarians.
- Identifiers
- 991013396821502368
- Copyright
- © 2026 The Author(s).
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article