Claiming Episcopal school identity : principles, understanding, and practice.

Claiming Episcopal school identity : principles, understanding, and practice.

Episcopal, school, identity, principles, practices, understanding

By Kenneth Roger Willy, 2016 -- Every Episcopal school is different, and each school’s understanding of what makes it Episcopal and how that identity is translated into action, is specific to its own context. Claiming Episcopal School Identity: Principles, Understanding, and Practices is based on my work as the newly appointed Headmaster of the Oak Hall Episcopal School (OHES). In this role I led the School community (Board, Faculty & Staff, Parents, and Students) to a deeper understanding of what it meant for them to be an Episcopal school, and the practices they should embrace to better live into that identity. To guide this process, I developed three Principles of Episcopal School Identity (ESI) from the synthesis of material and resources made available from associations, dioceses, schools and individuals. For further clarification, I differentiated between the Principles and the Practices that demonstrate these Principles. The results of an audit of the current practices at OHES gave the basis for a three-phased approach to developing clearer understandings of ESI. On three occasions over a 22-month period the subject group, comprised of faculty & staff, was asked, “What is most distinctive, enduring, and central to an Episcopal school?” Their responses were used to measure the development in their understanding of Episcopal school identity. The results showed that the subjects began with a much stronger understanding of ESI than they had been credited with prior to the start of the Project, and that through the use of a variety of strategies, the understanding of some subjects was increased or deepened. However, the development of, and education about, ESI will remain an ongoing project as there are always new Faculty & Staff, new Trustees, new Parents, and new Students joining the Oak Hall Episcopal School community.

Willy, Kenneth Roger

See record for the print version at VTS Library Catalog.

Virginia Theological Seminary

2016

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives-4.0 International License, © Copyright Kenneth R. Willy, 2016.