Dr J. Copier (Jorien) MA

Breaking and Sharing Stories: Leadership and Ultimate Meaning in Catholic Primary Schools

School leaders of Catholic primary schools in the Netherlands have a leading role in starting and keeping up the dialogue on the identity of their schools and the quality of education in their schools. These dialogues touch upon existential questions, since the question ‘What is good’ education' is closely related to questions like: ‘What is the purpose of our education?’, ‘What does the good life look like?’ and ‘What do we understand as a good human being?’. For many school leaders it is a challenge to reach this existential level in these conversations.

This research starts from the assumption that the dialogue on the identity and quality of schools can be more successful when school leaders are aware of their personal ultimate concerns. When school leaders can deploy their personal spiritual biography in their professional practice it will be easier for them to design these existential conversations in which school teams must define their right to exist.

This qualitative intervention study aims at developing, testing and evaluating an intervention training for school leaders that equips them in this complex task. The training aims at increasing school leaders’ awareness of their spiritual biography and clarifying what is of ultimate meaning for them. The next step is to connect these ultimate concerns to their professional practice as school leaders. So that their personal life goals and that what is of ultimate meaning manifests itself in their professional identity as a school leader. Eventually the intervention will equip and support school leaders in the creation of a shared, rich and directive narrative identity of their schools.

Supervisors: Prof. dr. C.A.M. Hermans, dr. T. van der Zee

• Religion and the Crisis of Meaning (RCM)

• Chair of Empirical and practical religious studies