Paul Sharkey

Managing Educational Change: Leading an Ignatian Charism Project - a Hermeneutic Case Study in a Jesuit School Paul Sharkey

The conceptual framework for the book was developed from the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer and also from writers who engaged with Gadamer, most notably, Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. The subject matter of this thesis is timely because religious identity issues are of critical significance at this time in Catholic education. The hermeneutic orientation of this thesis highlighted the elements of understanding, interpretation and meaning, and these elements are given some prominence in the more recent research literature on the change process. The researcher was actively involved in the events investigated in the case study, and a case narrative was developed from the researcher?s experience as a change agent. Change agentry was presented in this thesis as unfolding in a middle space between the familiarity of current practice and the unfamiliarity of the new world that a change process seeks to open up. Hermeneutics has long understood that that interpretation would be impossible if the expressions of life were totally alien and unnecessary if there was nothing alien in them.