“Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor”: Indigenous students’ academic buoyancy and the locale of the learner

Abstract

This article explores how academic buoyancy, a concept from the educational psychology literature, can be used to understand the experiences of Indigenous secondary students’ schooling. Academic buoyancy refers to students’ ability to overcome everyday challenges of schooling. In this project, 11 Indigenous secondary students in a remote school shared their experiences of school and how they developed a range of capabilities to overcome the everyday challenges. Factors often seen as cultural impediments for Indigenous students, such as the “shame factor”, can be viewed as agentic attempts by Indigenous students to develop new capacities, such as a strategy to deal with the fear of failure. It is through these attempts that students develop strategies to negotiate the classroom without giving up their own cultural positions. This article extends earlier research on resilience to focus on the development of academically buoyant capacities that allow students to better navigate the complexities at the locale of the remote Indigenous learner.