"That then becomes a pure survival strategy"

Resilience as the stabilisation of structural overload in the field of early childhood education

Abstract

Since Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith’s long-term developmental studies (1989/2001), resilience has been discussed as a protective factor in human development; in educational discourse, the term has become a key pedagogical category that is as influential as it is ambivalent. For a long time, an individualistic logic of protection dominated, while organisational, power-analytical and structural conditions of pedagogical practice were largely overlooked. More recent contributions, by contrast, focus on a ‘pedagogy of vulnerability’ (Seitzer et al., 2026) and highlight anthropological dimensions of vulnerability and its institutional production. Here, vulnerability is seen not primarily as a risk to be minimised, but as a fundamental condition of educational relationships, which are reinforced, stabilised or obscured by organisational structures. This paper critically examines how resilience-related demands arise, are conveyed and internalised within early years education, and what function they fulfil under current conditions of structural overload (Wehrmann, 2023). The starting point is the assumption that resilience and vulnerability are not a continuum, but a professional antinomy (Helsper, 2004; 2021). The central thesis is that resilience stabilises structural deficits when addressed in policy and professional discourse as an individual coping requirement (PH NÖ, 2024; Krienzer & Mooshammer, 2024; Hofmann & Kruse, 2021). Organisations function as programmatic mediating spaces where normative logics of expectation and responsibility operate, translating structural demands into subjective self-imposed demands. Based on a reconstructive biographical case study, this paper shows how resilience-related orientations become biographically habitualised and legitimised as professional ethics. The analysis illustrates that motives to help and dispositions toward responsibility can subjectively stabilise organisational overload, while making it harder to set boundaries and practise professional self-restraint.