WISL

A total of 37 participants found themselves at the Good Shepherd Spirituality Center for the very first offering of the second WISL (Workshop on Ignatian School Leadership), entitled “Workshop on Communal Discernment and Ignatian Decision Making.” The participants represented schools from four countries in Asia Pacific: Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines.

Ms. Eva Galvey of the Emmaus Center for Psycho-Spiritual Formation, longtime formator of Jesuits in the Philippine Province, collaborated with Fr. Johnny Go SJ, JCAP Education secretary, to design and offer an experience of communal apostolic discernment for the participants. The goal was to draw from this experience to find a way to add a dimension of communal discernment to the way we make decisions in our schools.

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Note: This is a reflection from one of the participants of the Workshop on Communal Discernment and Ignatian Decision Making. Mr. John Bilog is a faculty member of the Ateneo de Manila Senior High School. 

My experience at WISL 2 was like that of a refugee being taken in by the openness and hospitality of strangers with a shared mission.

I would first like to share a bit about my context before I headed to the mountains of Antipolo for this week-long workshop. The K-12 education reform has cast my school community out of what we considered our home as far back as we could remember. New structures had to be established to meet the demands of a changing landscape initiated by our government, and these came with a steep price. Longstanding traditions were uprooted, familiar practices were displaced, and all our comfort zones were stripped away. Adjusting has been harder for us who have been with the school for a longer time, as we hold more memories and feel more sentiment towards how we were as a community in the now seemingly distant past. Our administration has held sessions on transition management and venues for feedback. But more and more of us have become concerned and ask about decisions that were made as we go along the way. (more…)