Resilience as a strategy for Venezuelan educators to cope with the challenges of the current educational system

Abstract

The research aims to understand and uncover the defining elements that guide the praxis of Venezuelan teachers in times of anomie, placing emphasis on resilience as a trait that sustains teachers’ vocation for service. This intrinsic characteristic of the self enables them to overcome the effects of adverse circumstances and to find adaptive ways of exercising their profession, even when the school is marked by a context of pronounced instability and institutional disintegration. It is nevertheless necessary to acknowledge the depth of the precariousness affecting the Venezuelan educational system and the deteriorated working conditions of teachers, which undermine their well-being and threaten their life projects. In spite of this, professional practice is characterized by patterns of resolutive adaptation that seek not to abandon the generation that continues to be educated in classrooms, with the aim of ensuring a certain continuity of the educational process and preserving the meaning of the pedagogical task. The research is framed within a qualitative approach, under the interpretive paradigm, with a descriptive scope and a documentary design. It concludes that one of the elements on which current educational practice rests is resilience, understood as a strategy of subjective containment and as a mediating element of teaching work, expressed in the capacity to persist in the act of educating in the face of the complex social, political, economic and historical conditions that the country is experiencing.