Page 117 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

The first meeting resulted in a consensus in the group about the values of the
school and about their concept of religious education. The teachers also formulated
design requirements for a celebration in the context of dialogue and encounter.
In the second meeting, the teachers discussed the coherency and tensions
between their personal and professional values for education, the values from
the formal school documents and the lived practice of religious education.
In the third meeting, the subjective professional theory of the teachers regarding
a good celebration was explored and ideas for form and content of the new 5 celebration were discussed.
The last meeting was the evaluation meeting, in which the participants reflected on the degree of success in light of the objective of dialogical religious education. During the group sessions the first author played an explicit role: he contributed to the meetings by putting forward results of our previous research, theory about dialogue in religious education and quotes from formal documents of the school. His interventions aimed at facilitating the teachers in expressing themselves by sharing motives, concepts and ideas and at creating an awareness of the relevance of encounter and dialogue in constructing a celebration that would correspond to the school values.
The first three sessions can be seen as the planning phase of the research cycle, while the celebration is the acting phase, the monitoring of the celebration marks the end of the observation phase, and the fourth session (evaluation) can be seen as the reflection phase (cf. Koshy 2010). Regrettably, there was no time for a second research cycle to continue the process and improve the celebration based on the conclusions from the reflection phase.
We used various kinds of data in our research. For instance, school documents and website entries were subjected to a content analysis to create a picture of the school’s vision on education and on religious education and to get acquainted with the core values of the school. The results were inserted in the discussions in the group sessions. All four group sessions were recorded in order to monitor the design and evaluation process. We also retrieved participant reports from each session. These reports were structured based on open questions regarding the teachers’ learning process (e.g. ‘What did you discover’; ‘what do you have to learn?’). Written artefacts such as value cards and paper sheets from a flap-over created during the sessions were also analyzed.
A PILOT STUDY
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