Brief History of the Curious Orienteers
Community of Practice of the ACPE

November 1, 2022

The Curious Orienteers Community of Practice of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education began in April of 2021 with the mission: Through formal and informal research, to explore the experiences and attitudes of ACPE Educators about the major changes made to the ACPE organizational culture and primary functions in the past several years.
Our first major project was to create and circulate a questionnaire to all active certified educators about how the changes to the organizational structure, accreditation and certification processes, board of directors, and the ethos of the ACPE website and ACPE Newsletter have affected their work and their wellbeing. It is a serious effort at using the action-reflection-new action method (clinical method) of learning to evaluate the results of having made those changes, to eventually suggest new changes to continue the professional development of the ACPE.

We were unable to enlist the executives, the research committee, the board of directors, or the ACPE national office to participate in the formation and implementation of the survey.

The final form of the questionnaire is available here at www.spiritualclician.com  Also available here are reports of analysis of both the qualitative and quantitative questions that make up the questionnaire, the former led by Judy Ragsdale, Cynthia Vaughn, Al Ezenwata, and Jeff Silberman, and the latter by Orin Newberry. The raw data is also available here, including some 48 pages of the 122 actual results out of 562 educators surveyed. The results have been forwarded to the ACPE Board and Executives; Committee and Commission chairs; and the planning group now discussing strategies for the future of the ACPE.