This workshop for educators in the CISVA is a kick-off event for The Promise of Christian Education: Past, Present, and Future, an international conference which will be held from May 1-3, 2025 at St. Mark’s College at UBC. The workshop will be followed by a light reception for participants before the conference’s opening plenary talk at 7PM.
Your engagement with theology matters to Catholic schools. Theological commitments influence policy and practice, which shape how you think and talk about your work. Knowing theology enhances your involvement in conversations about what is going well and what needs improvement in Catholic schooling.
This session invites your participation in a conversation about how Catholic schools reflect and inform the Church’s efforts at Reconciliation with Indigenous people in Canada. It will argue that the Church’s current approach to religious diversity may impede a full apology for residential schooling. These commitments reside within an array of other choices, however, and this session will propose that the realities in Catholic schools indicate that many Catholic communities take those choices seriously. This session will encourage you to describe Reconciliation efforts at your schools, and to evaluate a proposal that they might prompt the Church to reconsider its approach to religious diversity.
Date: May 1, 2025
Time: 4:00-6:00pm
Location: St. Mark’s College at UBC
About the speaker
Graham McDonough is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. In 2018 he received that faculty’s Teaching Excellence Award for his work teaching courses in anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology of education to undergraduate teacher candidates. He is also an Associate Fellow at UVic’s Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, which is one of the venues where he shares his research on controversial issues in Catholic education. Outside the academy he has made presentations to Catholic school teachers, administrators, and trustees in Saskatoon, Regina, and Waterloo, and for six years he served on the St Patrick School Local School Council in Victoria, BC, including four years as its Chair. His book, Beyond Obedience and Abandonment: Toward a Theory of Dissent in Catholic Education, is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
