Resilience in higher education settings during the COVID-19 pandemic: A scoping literature review with implications for policy and practice

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the construct of resilience has received growing attention in the higher education literature. The pandemic, acting as an external stressor, impacted multiple higher educational settings in 2020 during the period of lockdowns, when universities had to temporarily close on-campus activities and shift to online emergency responses. The objective of this scoping review is to explore how resilience was conceptualized in the higher education research literature during the initial emergency response phase of the pandemic, and how conceptual and research design choices in this early body of literature shaped policy recommendations aimed at enhancing resilience of individuals and support systems in higher education settings. This article, thus, contributes to the ongoing discussion in the academic and policy-relevant literature on how to better prepare universities as organizations and communities for a response not only during the emergency pandemic, but also beyond in post-pandemic higher education settings. In particular, the paper examines five related questions, as pertaining to the early literature on the university emergency response in higher education: 1) how, and at which levels (i.e. individual, community, organization, system) was resilience conceptualized, 2) what types of research questions on resilience were being explored in this literature (i.e. determinants of resilience, or impacts of resilience), 3) how, and via which instruments, resilience was measured, 4) which factors were found to be facilitative for resilience, and 5) which factors were found to be impacts of resilience. The article synthesizes the findings of the early literature on resilience in higher education during the pandemic emergency response, and discusses important areas for further academic research, highlighting the implications for relevant support policies and interventions.

Keywords: resilience, higher education, university emergency response, COVID-19, policy

JEL Classification: I20, I23