Pollefeyt, D: Identity in Dialogue

The Enhancing Catholic School Identity Project (ECSIP) is a research and implementation project aimed at assessing and enhancing the identity of Catholic schools. Situated in increasingly pluralising cultural contexts, Catholic schools face the challenge of Recontextualising their identity in a culturally plausible and theologically legitimate way. To this end, ECSIP has developed a suite of empirical instruments that provide an in-depth analysis of a school‘s current, as well as desired, identity in a statistically reliable way. After describing and interpreting the results, the empirical insights lead to well-informed recommendations aimed at the identity development of Catholic schools, with a normative preference for the Recontextualising Dialogue School model as the way to enhance Catholic identity in a context of diversity. In this manner, ECSIP supports on-going processes of (self-) assessment that form the basis for continuing dynamics of (self-) improvement of the identity of Catholic educational institutions.