Policy Responsiveness to Building Resilience in Education: Opportunities for Innovators

Individual resilience is strengthened by protective external socio-economic factors and institutional environment that impact their development. As an environment where young individuals spend a share of their time, education institutions are also the external context for fostering individual resilience (Caleon & King, European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 37(1), 52–64, 2020). However, education institutions themselves are vulnerable to a variety of socio-economic shocks which impact their capacity to deliver a quality of education and to which they seek to make themselves more resilient. These potential shocks can be divided into four categories: disruption to the relationship with others, disruption to the relationship with themselves, disruption to access to learning resources, and disruption to education and employment pathways (Education Policy Outlook 2021, Shaping responsive and resilient education in a changing world, OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/75e40a16-en, 2022). Education is the foundation for not only economic growth, but also innovation development. Therefore, the efforts to reduce the impact of shocks must lay the foundation of institutional resilience in the education sector. The present paper discusses the dynamics of higher education system resilience, focusing on the case of the largest university in Lithuania - Vilnius University. It investigates the experience of students during COVID-19 pandemic. This is exploratory basic qualitative research, aiming to understand how such education institutions as universities were self-organized in this period in response to national policy decisions. The analytical framework of this research applies the concept of resilience based on the classification of shocks to discuss emergent changes to create and develop learning innovations.