Building school community resilience: the principal's role as an emotional anchor and communicator during crisis

Lydia Pujol; Martín Enrique Durán-Aponte

doi:10.51574/hamka.v5i1.118

Authors

Lydia Pujol
lpujol@usb.ve
Educational Department, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas 1080-A, Venezuela
Martín Enrique Durán-Aponte Educational Department, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas 1080-A, Venezuela

Keywords:

Crisis leadership, Distributed leadership, Organizational resilience, Venezuela, Educational continuity

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigates how school principals navigate compound socio-economic crises, hyperinflation, and acute infrastructure collapse in Maracaibo, Venezuela, to sustain organizational resilience and pedagogical continuity.

Method: Employing a qualitative case study design, empirical data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions involving school principals, pedagogical coordinators, teaching staff, administrative personnel, and parent association (Consejo Educativo) representatives, analyzed via inductive thematic analysis.

Findings: Institutional resilience relies on three operational mechanisms: (1) principals serving as psychological anchors through authentic emotional validation; (2) opportunistic, transparent communication establishing cognitive immunity against misinformation; and (3) a transition from hierarchical dependence to guided autonomy, which fosters distributed leadership and emergency offline learning innovations.

Practical implications: The study offers educational authorities an actionable framework for integrating trauma-informed governance, low-bandwidth crisis communication protocols, and decentralized decision-making into administrator training programs for volatile environments.

Originality/value: This research extends socio-ecological resilience theory by demonstrating that administrative emotional validation and radical data transparency are essential structural prerequisites that unlock collective adaptive capacity during systemic collapse.

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