The master’s thesis concerns itself with the topic of resilience of educators and adolescents in connection to religious education. Firstly, it defines resilience as a person’s ability to mentally or emotionally face the challenges of life and to successfully overcome them. In the second part of the first chapter the concept of resilience is narrowed down to psychological resilience and its foundation, for example the awareness of the power of loving interpersonal relationships, the parents’, or educators’ awareness of the future of the children/adolescents they have educated, the awareness of a suitable parenting style and the positive consequences that the knowledge of the resilience as well as mastering its teachings brings. It also discusses the relevant topic of stress and its effects on the children’s and adolescents’ psychological strength. The next sections offers a detailed analysis of the components of the resilience following the “Seven C’s Model, which is followed by a subchapter on the appropriate type of communication for teaching resilience. The second chapter focuses on the topic of resilience in the context of schools. It touches upon the dangers that threaten the development of resilience in formal education and the ways of combating those elements. The thesis shows that the school environment has an important role in the development of resilience and can sometimes even fill in for what had been missed at home.
The empirical part of this thesis presents the survey’s results on current level of awareness of resilience among the educators and high school students in connection to religious and cultural education. I tried to find out how important the topic of resilience is to the teachers and how much time do they dedicate to it by posing questions related to the topic in the context of classes, to the curriculum for the school subject named ‘Religion and Culture’ and to the coursebooks for the said subject. The findings show that despite the teachers’ good grasp on the topic of resilience, there is still some room for improvement when it comes to teaching the students about the importance of resilience, about its skilful usage and its practical applications in life.
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