Toward Understanding the School Lifeworld in Crisis Conditions: A Phenomenology of Teachers' and Students' Resilience in the Forty-Day War

Objective: This study aimed to understand teachers’ and students’ lived experience of resilience in the school lifeworld during the forty-day war.

Method: A qualitative descriptive phenomenological design was used. Participants were 15 teachers (principals, deputies, counselors, and subject teachers) and 25 students (girls and boys) from war-affected areas of Kurdistan Province, selected through purposive and snowball sampling until data saturation. Data were collected through online semi-structured interviews, two focus group sessions, and field notes, and analyzed with Colaizzi’s seven-step method. The analysis was inductive and no theoretical framework was imposed on the data; Giddens’s and Bourdieu’s concepts were used only to interpret the findings.

Findings: Six main themes emerged: collapse of school order; fundamental insecurity and loss of confidence in the future; social creativity in crisis; reciprocal care and empathy; social solidarity and collective capital; and redefinition of the school’s identity and function from an educational space into a psychological refuge. The fundamental structure of the experience was the “dialectical reconstruction of the school lifeworld”: teachers’ and students’ creative agency in the face of war-induced collapse produced a new situation that was neither a return to the past nor passivity.

Conclusion: School resilience in war is a social, dynamic, and context-bound phenomenon shaped by the interplay of structure and agency. Strengthening schools’ social capital, providing psychosocial support for teachers, and designing alternative education platforms are the main policy implications.