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This study examines educational resilience as a process of dynamic adaptation between students’ expectations and schools’ institutional responses during crises. In this context, institutional trust emerges as a critical mechanism for fostering resilience, serving as the connective tissue that enables educational organizations to maintain functional cohesion and collective effectiveness. This process is closely linked to the formation of citizenship, as students’ experiences with school institutions shape the pre-political frameworks through which they perceive democratic values, institutional credibility, and their own future participation in the public sphere. This conceptualization is further reinforced by a thematic analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews with Greek public secondary school students, revealing low levels of institutional trust resulting from school relationships and managerial issues. These kinds of mistrust erode not only the resilience of school organizations but also the process of civic engagement and restrict students from developing experiences of participation, accountability, and democratic ethos within the school institution. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for school leadership, which is called to act as an agent of transformation by strengthening both the institutional conditions for resilience and the pedagogical environment that fosters the cultivation of active and critical citizenship.
Resilience; Trust; Education; Crices; Leadership; Citizenship
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Educational Resilience, Institutional Trust, and the Formation of Citizenship: Student Experiences as a Reflection of the Challenges of School Leadership
How to cite this paper: Victoria Konidari, Georgios Bestias. (2025). Educational Resilience, Institutional Trust, and the Formation of Citizenship: Student Experiences as a Reflection of the Challenges of School Leadership. The Educational Review, USA, 9(11), 932-945.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2025.11.008