Page 29 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

Research question
Research group Strategies of enquiry Data collection method
5.2.1. Phase 1
What is the contribution of Dewey’s concept of democracy to 1 the reflection on values and religious education at cooperation
schools?
None
Conceptual study None
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
In our first phase, we mapped the field by answering the question of how cooperation schools construct their identity and what implications that has for the organization of religious education. We selected cooperation schools based on a formal list of all primary schools, supplied by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. Based on this list and an analysis of online documents of the selected schools, 35 schools were found. The analysis of the school websites helped us to verify whether the schools in the list identified themselves as cooperation schools and whether they were the product of a merger between a nongovernment school and a public school. After this analysis, a questionnaire was sent online to the principals of all the 35 schools. The questionnaire was semi-structured: the 25 questions contained eight open questions, five multiple choice questions and twelve questions with specified answers as well as an empty field to add personal answers. One category of questions provided us with information on facts about the school, such as the year of origin, the original merging identities and the identity of the board. Another category contained questions about the integrated school identity and, especially, tried to uncover what key values the respondents considered characteristic for their school identity. A category also focused on the restricted identity, and asked about the organization of religious education. Seventeen principals replied by answering the questions. The provided data were collected and analyzed.
We interpreted the answers in the open field of the open-structured questions and some open questions by using Descriptive Coding (Saldaña 2009): characteristic central ideas in the answers are extracted from the individual data. We used Descriptive Coding because this approach allowed us to gain a clearer understanding of what is going on in the general field of cooperation schools and provide a foundation for the following phases of our research (Saldaña 2009). Two questions were asked about values and educational goals in the formal documents of the schools. We used Values Coding (Saldaña 2009) to get a clear
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