In the collaborative work of the last eight years between Emmanuel and St. Chad College and the Western Education Collaborative Anglican Network (a.k.a. W.E.C.A.N.), we have reached a few special milestones! With sponsorship from participating dioceses and our National Church through the Anglican Foundation, Emmanuel and St. Chad and WECAN have been able to hire a Licentiate in Theology Implementation Coordinator whose work has been instrumental in keeping things moving along and consulting the partner diocesan school coordinators.
One of these special milestones has been the wide approval of the Licentiate in Theology Handbook which was confirmed in the Spring of 2021. Licentiate students and instructors are to consult this resource as they make their way through the licentiate program. In the handbook, you can find the outline and learning goals for each of the L.Th. courses to be administered either within a participating diocese or across dioceses and possibly through Emmanuel and St. Chad College. Among other relevant tasks, E.S.C. College offers: teaching resources, orientation sessions and support to the local instructors and mentors of students in the program, manages student access to the STU digital library, and will eventually grant the licentiate certificate to students who successfully complete their program.
The second exciting milestone has been the launching of the esc-wecan.ca website which went live on Tuesday, September 5, 2023. This electronic platform has been constructed in close consultation with the WECAN partners who have voiced the need for specific capabilities and content to be included. An L.Th. or occasional student registers online for a course or several courses coming up in their diocese or another diocese and upon pressing “send” the student is electronically directed to the relevant Google Classroom to find further details for the course they are interested in as well as reading material and other preliminary instructions. Local Diocesan School Coordinators are given clearance to: enter the details of courses they are hosting and monitor their students’ progress through the L.Th. program. Instructors are given clearance to exercise freedom in using their own Google Classroom, include required reading material and give feedback to the student online regarding their fulfilment of a course’s learning goals and competencies.
The dioceses and institutions engaged in the LicentiateImplementation Journey have been: Kootenay, Qu’Appelle, Athabasca, Saskatoon, Yukon, the Indigenous Spiritual Ministry of Mishamikoweesh, Emmanuel and St. Chad College, SK and Henry Budd College in The Pas, MB. With the regular input of these participating institutions, we are now poised to launch the program itself.
