title: Teaching and learning resilience: building adaptive capacity for rural practice. A report and subsequent analysis of a workshop conducted at the Rural Medical Educators Conference, Savannah, Georgia, May 18, 2010.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Resilience, the capacity to endure and overcome hardship, has been suggested as a basic competency for rural medical practice. Unfortunately for physician educators, the medical education literature offers only limited guidance for nurturing this adaptive capacity. We describe the process and subsequent analysis of a daylong curriculum development workshop conducted at the annual meeting of Rural Medical Educators in 2010.
  
  
  METHODS
  Fifty administrator, faculty and student attendees reflected individually and worked in groups to construct key curricular components and modalities for teaching this competency. Prior to the meeting, participants were asked to submit a personal story about resilience. The 22 narratives received were distributed across 8 groups and provided the grist for the small group discussions, in which each group identified key concepts for teaching and learning about resilience, constructed a concept map, and developed a curriculum that was presented to all session participants. Concept maps, curriculum outlines and notes taken during the presentations were analyzed using content analysis techniques.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Data highlight the importance of (1) embracing hardship as an opportunity for growth, (2) viewing resilience as both an individual and community property, (3) pursuing adaptability more than hardiness, and (4) setting a lifelong pattern of learning this competency in practice. Specific teaching modalities are suggested including individual reflective time and group activities.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  To our knowledge this represents a first effort to define and develop a medical curriculum for teaching resiliency in rural predoctoral and residency education.
authors.affiliation: Ohio State University Rural Residency Program, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA.
authors.forename: Randall
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Longenecker
authors.forename: Therese
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zink
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Florence
mesh_terms: D003479:Curriculum; D004501:Education, Medical; D005260:Female; D005845:Georgia; D006801:Humans; D007396:Internship and Residency; D008297:Male; D055500:Resilience, Psychological; D012423:Rural Health / Q000193:education*; D019035:Rural Health Services; D013663:Teaching / Q000379:methods*