Resilience in Urban Middle School Students: The Impact of Character Education

Abstract

There is a benefit in promoting character education in urban school settings. Character education could foster traits of resiliency and support youth in recognizing their innate abilities to become successful future citizens and leaders despite the adversities they may encounter. Resilience is an adaptive behavior trait that combats adversity. The recent research on resilience and youth is a growing topic due to the benefits of positive youth development. This literature review and study will explore characteristics of resilience and character education to identify a correlation between the two principles in regard to positive development within urban youth. Resilience traits such as purpose, problem solving, social competence, and autonomy will be the focus while incorporating character education traits such as trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, caring, fairness and citizenship.