Individual Resilience as a Competency for Aviation Professionals: A Review of the Literature
Timothy Ropp, Stephen Belt
2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings
unpublished
Graduates from aviation and aerospace technical and engineering disciplines emerge with certifications and academic coursework to fulfill the respective degree requirements, but may still lack fluency in key non-technical competencies to fully leverage their professional credentials and academic preparation. Due to the applied nature of the aviation and aerospace disciplines, problem-based learning approaches implicitly seek to incorporate and develop such skills as part of the educational
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... ience. Individual resilience is one example of a nontechnical competency sought by employers across high consequence, technology-based industries. However, a stronger shift from traditional lecture/lab course formats to more in-depth problem-based approaches can cause some learners to retreat from challenges due to early failures or from lack of sufficiently developed recovery techniques. This paper presents a theoretical model of individual resilience for applied engineering and technology-based learners. Such a model could assist instructors tailor pedagogical experiences to more fully integrate resilience during academic preparation. Toward this end, a cross-domain review from seminal and modern research on resilience theory from aviation/aerospace, education, medical and psychology literature was conducted. Five common resilience themes emerged: (1) Adversity persistence/perseverance; (2) Contextual awareness (picture making; visualizing and assessing problems and synthesizing decision strategies); (3) Self-directed/learning autonomy; (4) Change management and innovation, and (5) Social connectivity (peer relationships). The paper concludes with suggestions for next steps toward a practical teaching and learning resilience model for educators. Hernandez et al. in 2018 include resilience among top mental attitude and contextual responses necessary for retaining engineering students. Resilience competency attributes are practiced and transferred into the engineering environment where one faces challenge and failure modes as a matter of routine [3, pp. 2-3]. Aviation and aerospace education face similar competency challenges for learners and the workforce. There is strong emphasis for challenge-based learning scenarios to facilitate learners in establishing a continuously "inquisitive, resilient, critical thinking approach" to open-ended, problem-based learning that replicates industry [4] . Yet metrics for educators for strategic insertion and assessing successful integration remain a challenge [3, pp. 3-4].
doi:10.18260/1-2--34822
fatcat:jjdqqkiudff2dll2ylyy3yar2a