Development of coping ability with stress in school with the tools of resilience and psychological immune competence

Abstract

The article’s authors draw attention to stress, which is very frequent in everyday life and is still not given enough attention to in schools today. However, every step out of the comfort zone, unsolved problems, social interaction and difficulty, or even acquiring a bigger accomplishment can cause stress. Students’ difficulties may accumulate and manifest in distinct symptoms even for the teachers to notice. In order for students not to produce physical or mental symptoms of stress at school, teachers, faculty members and other professionals in school may have many solutions for. This task is inevitable and cannot be assigned to other social environments, because to deal with the given stress, it has to be solved quickly and reduced effectively in the environment where it had arisen. Thus, the reduction of the stress that arises in school environment and students’ targeted personality development become important pedagogical methodology questions.

Studying the literature and practice of positive psychology, also of the supporting, developing coaching work can help teachers to create their personalized methods and good practices for their students and student groups. The most effective tool for treating stress in school is to develop the components of psychological immune competence and resilience. One of the authors of this article trains art teachers at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pécs. This opened the door to start an improvement program series based on good practices for groups of applied art, design and visual art teacher major students. The improvement program series has been ongoing since 2016. Its purposes are raising students’ awareness about problems, developing their pedagogical creativity, as well as putting theory into pedagogical practice. Art teacher major students’ task was to design a plan for each class in the topic of art, which they have to try out in a student group. This was followed by mediated exchange of opinions, where students could reflect on the plan, the alternative options for solutions and the experience of testing the plan. Some of these practices were tried in real school environments during teacher trainees’ practicum. We summarized the conclusions of the development and the plan in a student praxis made of “good practices”. The samples presented by this study are mostly students’ works with one exception.