Abstract / Summary
Abstract Parental labor migration has left many rural Chinese adolescents navigating periods of reduced family care, including short-term and seasonal absences. Although teacher support is widely recognized as protective, less is known about the everyday practices through which teachers foster school belonging and resilience. Guided by Kumpfer's resilience framework, this qualitative case study drew on semistructured interviews with 15 teachers at a county high school in Jilin Province, China. The 16 interview transcripts (one teacher was interviewed twice) were analyzed in NVivo 15 using theory-informed and inductive thematic analysis supplemented by descriptive coding queries. The analysis identified a teacher-mediated process of resilience reorganization. Teachers first recognized a localized risk ecology comprising seasonal caregiving gaps, examination pressure, emotional vulnerability, and peer isolation. They then created relational safety, protected students' dignity, assigned meaningful classroom roles, scaffolded academic agency, and connected students with wider resources. In teachers' accounts, these practices were associated with greater openness and help-seeking, improved emotional regulation, stronger self-efficacy, and sustained academic engagement, although change remained uneven and fragile. The study introduces seasonal left-behindness as a context-specific sensitizing concept and proposes a micro-interactional model in which teachers translate environmental support into internal adaptive capacities. School belonging is therefore conceptualized both as an outcome of support and as a mechanism through which resilience can develop.