Enhancing Catholic School Identity

The course has five components.

1. Personal Identity
   • At the heart of any Catholic school is its people: its teachers, administrators, staff and volunteers; its trustees and board members; its parents; and of course its students, the very reason for which the school exists. When we want to describe the identity of a Catholic school today – with the aim of enhancing its future identity – we first look at how the individuals within the school relate to faith.
2. Institutional Identity
   • In this section, we turn from studying how individuals relate to religious content, to how they see their school relating to the Catholic faith tradition – that is, we move from personal perspectives regarding religious belief to how those same individuals perceive the identity of the school itself. You will learn how to assess Catholic identity and will be invited to think about how to strengthen it.
3. Professional Identity
   • In this section, we look at how cultural, moral, and religious diversity are treated in a Catholic school community. Here we will examine how individuals evaluate their current school environment and how they envision their ideal one. A school can respond in many ways to diversity, and to consider what these responses might look like in practice can help to support a Catholic school's future development.
4. Synthesis
   • In the synthesis, we bring all three perspectives together to see the school in its totality. We will take a look at the subpopulations and intercorrelations to have a broad and deep understanding of the identity of the school. The shift to a Recontextualising Catholic Dialogue School will be handled together with a case study.
5. From Individual Identity to School Identity
   • Finally, the possibility of setting up the School Identity Research in your school will be explained, as well as the analysis of meta-data to see on a more global level (group of schools, longitudinal perspective, diocesan perspective, etc.) how Catholic School Identity is developing.

All components are supported by knowledge clips, lectures, exercises, examples, online questionnaires, discussion fora, practical issues, case studies, etc.