4.2 Data analysis
4.2.1 Theme 1: Psychosocial Support systems
4.2.1.3 Psychosocial adaptation factors
Adaptation factors form one indispensable category in the provision of psychological support systems. Adaptation is described as the person’s functioning or the way in which people accomplish their goals, as well as the way they adjust to, and deal with, life challenges (Burke, 2013, p.465). Natural living organisms have the ability to modify their genetic make-up in order to survive harsh conditions or environments. Children adapt to their would-be-unbearable situations through attachment (Larsson, 2019). Attachment is a powerful relational construct.
Simply defined, attachment is a social bond that can apply to all aspects of child-parent relationships (Ucus, et al., 2019). It is an on-going process of establishing and maintaining an emotional bond with caregivers or other significant individuals, helping the child to explore and learn about their world (Mash & Wolfe, 2010). Individuals need to attain some measure of resilience for adaptation to be possible. As noted previously, resilience involves rebounding,
bouncing back, recovering, adapting or coping in response to risk, challenges or adversity (Ebersöhn & Ferreira, 2011;Yohani, et al., 2019).
Adaptation enables a person to live and thrive in an environment where they would naturally not be expected to survive. Structural modification and behavioural evolution enable them to exploit and master roles in their environment and enhance their capabilities relatively better compared with their peers (Fleagle, 2013). There are many examples of adaptation in our ecological midst. One example is that of a person who has feeble legs and gains double the strength in their arms as they adapt to using crutches. Another is the ‘fight or flight’ instinctive human response to danger. Adaptation has been found to have effect on psychosocial adjustment and emotional intelligence regulation (Piqueras, Mateu, Cejudo & Pérez-González, 2019).
Adaptation and coping are strategies to deal with adversity when all else has failed (Yohani, et al., 2019). The data generated revealed that teachers also had to adapt to the school situation.
After narrating her story of initially being overwhelmed to breaking point, a teacher participant at School A said, “It was my first time seeing so many children with multiple and severe disabilities… but now I like it here and I wouldn’t exchange this experience for anything.” A teacher from school B said she came to the school only because she could speak sign language and then she was naturalized into a caregiver, and then eventually groomed into a teacher who is now, according to her words, more of a mother to these vulnerable children. Adaptation is like improvisation; doing and achieving the most with the least. Ability to adapt and make most of situations is absolutely mandated for all teachers and learners in rural ecologies beset with glaring marginalisation.
The Head Boy of School A was wheelchair bound. He could not control his bowel and used nappies. This presents a sterling example of adaptation as empowerment: empowering a person beyond their limitations. Barak (2017) draws from thesocial cognitive theory (Bandura, 1989) to emphasize that behavioral and environmental factors that promote learners’ social and cognitive development. The story was also told, by one of the teacher participants, of a learner who used her prosthetic arms to push another learner in a wheelchair. Developing a strong sense of space orientation to compensate for blindness can also be regarded as evolutionary adaptation. One very interesting aspect of adaptation is that of “psycho-biological systems that might influence adaptive and resilient behaviour” (Khanlou & Wray, 2014, p.67). Such systems
include human functions such as those carried out in areas like the brain and neurological components. Scientific exploration of these neurological components is beyond the scope of this study. Suffice to say that biomedical adaptation promotes resilience. For example, some children who live on the street develop a formidable immune system that prevents them from catching colds and flu as easily as children that live in protected environments (Donald et al., 2010).
Psychosocial Support systems help to facilitate adaptation for children living with disabilities (Paguinto, Kasparian, Bray & Farrar, 2019). Thus, the definition of adaptation can be further augmented to encompass the internal support systems’ capacity to expand when environmental protective recourses are in short supply. A person’s internal support systems also increase in strength in such a situation. The threshold of the effect of risk factors is raised so that the same kind of adversity does not cause the expected amount of trauma. Khanlou and Wray (2014) describe resilience as a process where protective factors work to modify vulnerability to the effects of adversity. Where risk factors cannot be fully removed, adaptation becomes a natural coping strategy (Piqueras, et al., 2019). Adaptation can also be likened to what happens when a muscle is strained by a weight in a gym. It is eventually exercised by the same weight until it does not feel the strain anymore. It is not that the weight lost its potential to strain but that the muscle has adapted and increased in strength. The pain bar is raised. We can conclude that adaptation begets resilience which in turn toughens emotional viscosity.
Patterns of attachment surfaced many times in the data with, not only care-givers fulfilling this role, but also ‘significant others’ that individual children personally identified with. Children showed reliance and proximal attachment, not only to caregivers, but also to their peers, teachers, and social workers, and even to support staff like kitchen staff and gardeners. In School A, the social worker became a role model for many children. Participant 1 said: Family is the key word. We try to be one family. One learner said she would like to become a social worker, so that she can help abused children. This shows the kind of relationships established through relational adaptations. Donald et al. (2010, p.160) argue that protective resources are, at least potentially, present in proximal interactions at all levels of the social systems: family, peer groups, school, and local community. The broader community may be out of reach for these institutionalized children, So it is important for them to find role models and significant others in the local community for meaningful attachment (Li, et al., 2015). Communities of Practice should be understood as the ecologies that foster collaborations and local support for
the edification of the same community. Myende and Hlalele (2018) define an ecology as an open system, dynamic, interdependent, self-organizing and adaptive. It is clear from the document analysis that the learners greatly benefited from the psychosocial support systems.
This was much evident as they benefited from psychosocial services provided through attachment and by adaptation as elements of psychosocial support systems.