Much is being talked and written about as to how we can develop "grit" in our students. Recently in a eulogy for Tyler Trent, the Boilermaker perhaps most often in the news during the Fall of 2018, Purdue's President Mitch Daniels (2019) defined grit as "diligence, persistence and the resilience to face life's inevitable adversity with fortitude." Daniels said that Tyler Trent was "grit personified.  Dealt a hand worse than anyone here is facing, or God willing ever will, never stopped working, or fighting, or moving ahead." This is what we mean by grit.

For more on grit, Hoerr's 2012 article for Educational Leadership, entitled "Got Grit?" is a good place to start. He begins, "Every child needs to encounter frustration and failure to learn to step back, reassess and try again" and then goes on to explain why.  

In intercultural learning, we often talk about emotional resilience, which seems to be a combination of grit and comfort with ambiguity.  Abarbanel (2009) advises that students who travel abroad need to have "an 'emotional passport'" to help them to "regulate intense emotional challenges experienced in cultural transitions."  Waters (2013) provides a list of the "10 Traits of Emotionally Resilient People" which is useful whether or not one is in an education abroad context.

What follows is a collection of tools found in the Intercultural Learning Hub (HubICL) for the teaching of emotional resilience, which might be used to increase the grit and comfort with ambiguity of our students.

This collection compiles research on the relationship between grit and study abroad. Grit, defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals" (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews, & Kelly, 2007), has become a buzz word in higher education, as many cite this trait as the key to student success. Researchers almost unanimously agree that grit is cultivated through experience. Therefore, study abroad programs, which afford experiential learning opportunities, may help students develop higher levels of grit—and, in turn, higher levels of success. 

However, grit is not without controversy. Critics argue that the focus on grit (which is sometimes seen as an innate trait that one either "has" or "doesn't have") detracts from higher education's systemic inequities that disadvantage marginalized students. Therefore, this collection also presents research on the negative aspects of grit as well as the challenges that marginalized students confront when deciding to study abroad.