The chapter uses a dual perspective on literary as well as pedagogical analyses of resilience discourses in education in order to facilitate more sustained exchanges between the environmental humanities and educational research. It argues that literary and other media texts that express memorable moments of refusal can aid the conceptualisation of a resilience pedagogy that refrains from neoliberal solutionism and instead fosters reflexion and contemplation. The keynote for this comes from one posterchild of political and philosophical literary criticism—Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, whose iconic “I would prefer not to” has become subject of unending interpretive manoeuvres. This sentence and its reverberations in other texts, including storybooks for young readers and digital mock-documentaries, will be integrated into an educational framework of refusal and the possibility of not doing the things education for sustainable development asks pupils and students to do. Linking literary negativity and student resilience and refusal, powerfully articulated in international school strikes for climate action, yet equally significant as a narrative motif, the chapter aims to outline the contours of a more reflexive and subversive resilience pedagogy.