Lessons Learned: A Crisis Responder’s Journey Supporting Friends in Crisis

Crisis is an educational leadership concern as evidenced by crises that have impacted schools like 9-11, the rampage shootings at Columbine High School, and Hurricane Katrina. Educational leaders experience crisis on both personal and professional levels. This dissertation is my Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) about my journey as an educational leader in crisis response who supported friends in crisis. This dissertation is framed by literature related to chaos theory and crisis response. This research project uses the qualitative, postmodern methodology of Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) as described in Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative (Nash, 2004) and Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts (Nash & Bradley, 2011). SPN connects my personal narrative with the scholarly literature by flowing back and forth between the particulars of my journey to the universalizable lessons learned for my audience of educational leaders, crisis responders, counselors, and crisis response educators. My narrative was written from embodied memories of supporting my friends through specific crises. I then tied the narrative to the scholarly literature and gathered both personal and professional lessons learned.