Background

Our project on resiliency and wellbeing of successful students and teachers focuses on the personal growth of the educational agents who maintained continuous educational paths despite the adversities of the COVID-19 pandemic. The continuity is seen as success, resilient personal growth is analyzed through character strengths development, and wellbeing combines hedonic and eudaimonic positive and negative affects. 

Aims

The aim of the quantitative stage was to gain insight into the personal growth dynamics that accompanied educational and academic continuity of students and teachers of the Educational Sciences Department at a Mexican public University.

Method

The intentional sampling included 122 students and 65 teachers, the student sample was 70% undergrad, 70% female, mean age 27 years, and the teacher sample was 51% female, mean age 46, 19 years of mean teacher service. The Google Forms survey consisted of the biodata, resiliency and wellbeing sections, elaborated and validated by Belykh (2019), and adapted to the retrospective dynamic evaluation from the educational path perspective (Jiménez-Vásquez, 2014). 

Results

The results at group level reveal overall significant personal growth, which correlated negatively with the university path advancement. As to the wellbeing, students had significant increase in emotional intensity in all the dimensions, as well as the leading increase in the character strength of social and emotional intelligence (SEI). In teachers, all emotionality increased save for the negative eudaimonic affect, which decreased. Accordingly, the SEI increased less in teachers. 

Conclusion

The continuity of the educational path was accompanied by personal growth similar across samples, no character strength reported as decreased. It might indicate the pandemic factor as a natural booster of holistic personal growth, and suggest shared experience to build on in classroom activities. Wellbeing dynamics, on the other hand, differed significantly across samples, especially the negative affects. That might suggest emotions need to be treated from a differentiated perspective if strategies and good practices are to be shared.