Finding Harmony: Navigating the Balance Between Vulnerability and Resilience

Flowers on cracked earth

Wiktoria Moritz-Leśniak is reflecting on the ideas that emerged while she and her dissertation advisor, Professor Izabella Main, worked on their co-authored article “Migrant Parents at the Intersection of Vulnerability and the Demands of Poland’s Education System.”

Wiktoria writes:

Beyond Vulnerability: What Parents’ Stories Reveal

While researching the topic of vulnerability, I realized that the reality is far from simple or black-and-white. The parental experiences I encountered within the Polish educational system were far more complex and nuanced than the concept of vulnerability alone suggests.

Each story shared during my fieldwork interviews revealed that, regardless of the struggles or vulnerabilities encountered in relation to children’s schooling, parents reflected on the various practices they adopted to manage difficulties. These narratives challenged static understandings of vulnerability and pointed instead to ongoing processes of negotiation, adaptation, and action.

Why a Continuous Narrative Matters

From the very beginning of our work, we knew that a continuous narrative was necessary in order to give these experiences a multi-dimensional voice. Rather than isolating particular problems or deficits, we sought to represent parents’ experiences in a way that would capture their internal complexity, contradictions, and everyday strategies. This approach allowed parents’ voices to emerge more fully and avoided reducing their experiences to a single analytical category.

Community Resilience and the Role of Schools

As I analyzed these narratives, I uncovered multiple layers of support that parents relied on. I first examined these layers through the lens of community resilience and its elements, as conceptualized by Martina Olcese and colleagues (2024). This perspective encouraged me to think more carefully about how resilience operates not only at the individual level, but also through relationships, networks, and institutions.

This, in turn, led me to consider the role of schools more closely—specifically, which actors are involved in drawing parents into community life and how this engagement takes shape. Throughout my analysis, resilience emerged as a crucial element enabling parents to take action. At the same time, I observed that resilience is not solely an individual trait: it can be socially reinforced, supported, or constrained by the surrounding environment, including school practices and attitudes.

Agency, Engagement, and the Question of Inclusion

From a psychological perspective, a sense of agency is a fundamental component of health and well-being, and strengthening agency increases people’s motivation to act (Renes & Arts, 2018). This raised further questions for me: How do parents perceive their own agency? In what kinds of engagement practices can it be observed?

In my interviews, parents frequently mentioned the school’s role in encouraging participation in activities such as presentations, picnics, parent–teacher meetings, and academic support initiatives. While these forms of engagement are important, I leave open the question of whether they are sufficient for parents to feel genuinely included in the school community. More attention and active listening may be needed to ensure that participation is meaningful rather than merely formal. Such meaningful engagement, in turn, may actively reinforce a sense of agency and resilience within migrant families.

Looking Ahead: Recognizing Overlooked Forms of Engagement

In future texts, I aim to show what practices parents used, what kinds of communities they sought or created, and how schools contributed to these processes. I hope this work will serve as food for thought for developing more practical implications—ones in which migrant parents’ voices are noticed, and both their difficulties and their resilience are recognized.

Ultimately, acknowledging these often-overlooked forms of parental engagement can help inform more adequate school practices and create more space for meaningful student–parent–school collaboration. I look forward to sharing more reflections on this topic.