Building resilience is an important element to achieve social and academic success for young adults in Taiwan. Resilience assets which include problem solving skills, communication skills, autonomy and a sense of purpose can help ease the pressure when facing tremendous economic and societal change.
Nevertheless little attention and research is put in fostering students’ resilience in the higher education. It is believed to be a critical part and should be integrated in the higher education curriculum.
The aim of this paper is to explore the students’ development of resilience in a service-learning course in a business school in Taiwan. Service-learning is a pedagogy often used to enable students to apply classroom-learned knowledge in a real world context. By participating in this course, students are required
to voluntarily offer professional services to selected non-profit and community-based organisations. The learning activities are especially related to marketing and advertising, from marketing planning, advertising and promotion design, to evaluation of the final outcomes. Action research has been chosen as the research methodology because it is a way to allow the contextual and cultural factors be fully articulated and examined in the research. The types of data include study and research journals, open-ended questionnaire, individual and group interviews, and digital records of the classes.
The result has shown that the students have experienced a great deal of difficulties, emotional turmoil and even ideas to withdraw throughout the process of service delivery, as it is similar to working in the real world context. Social support seems to help easing the negative emotions and reluctance while peer encouragements providing comfort to restore confidence. As the results of solving problems and managing stress throughout the process, the students have demonstrated at end of the course their increase of resilience through the following: (1) they were able to internally transform negative emotions to positive learning forces; (2) instead of blaming external factors, they have reflected on themselves and learned from the experience; (3) they have more empathy towards other members of the group; (4) they acquire better communication skills; (5) their self-esteem has boosted. The findings may provide educators and researchers insights in resilience building.
