Leadership in chilean early childhood education during the pandemic: experiences and meanings

Abstract The COVID-19 health emergency that began in 2019 continues, to this day, to affect a large percentage of the world population. In order to deter its progress, countries have generated various health protocol strategies, including the readjustment of their educational systems. Thus, face-to-face learning was replaced with online classes, and teaching staff were tasked with generating the adjustments necessary to provide continuity to learning processes — at least, to the extent to which their contexts allowed them to. The complexity of this task has called for leaders whose practices, in tandem with all members of the educational community, may invigorate the pedagogical, management and communicational processes involved, as this ever-evolving context demands. This article presents the construction of meanings and leadership practices of 5 leaders in early child educational centers in Chile during the years 2020 and 2021. We worked under a comprehensive-interpretive paradigm, a qualitative approach, and a grounded theory situated design. Our data collection instrument were narrative interviews. We studied the data through content analysis and using the software ATLAS.ti 9.0. The findings here presented highlight the importance of leadership practices in educational work and show some characteristics of early childhood education, a level of education at which leadership processes are located and tend towards care, the distribution of tasks, and trust.