Page 30 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema
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CHAPTER 1
perspective on the school values as described in the documents in order to detect the “participants’ values, attitudes, beliefs, representing his or her perspectives or worldview” (Saldaña 2009, 89).
Tocheckthereliabilityofthedata,anon-responseinquirytookplace.Weconducted an analysis of the online documents of the remaining schools. Five themes were compared with the results of the online questionnaire: the origin of the identity of the merged schools, the board identity, key values, admittance policy and the organization of religious education. The information from the non-response inquiry could not in all cases be extracted from the online documents: some simply could not be found, while others were not easy to interpret. Therefore, only the data that were traceable were compared with the data from the respondents.
5.2.2. Phase 2
In the second phase, we conducted a single case study. Because the results of our first phase indicated a group of schools that organize collective religious education for all students, we were curious about the motivations and the concrete practice, in relation to the school values. We selected a school that exemplified this type of schools: a school where formal documents mention equality and respect as key values, which organizes collective religious education for all students together. A single case study provided us the opportunity to study “multiple units of analysis” in order “to better understand a particular case” (Gray 2014, 274). The case study made it possible to study the school in depth from different angles: the school values, the didactics and the content of moments of contemplation, and the motives and values of the teachers. We analyzed school documents and the lesson guide for religious education, video recordings of moments of contemplation, and teacher interviews.
For the analysis of the recorded moments of contemplation, we constructed an observation format. In this format, several aspects are specified under the following categories: time, physical space, participants, activities, sources, religious content. In order to investigate the values and motives of teachers, we interviewed them at their school and analyzed the transcriptions in a data-analyzing computer program (QDA-miner) using codes and sub-codes. We used two coding strategies: Descriptive and Values Coding (Saldaña 2009). This approach allowed us to discover the current practice of religious education and what values grounded the
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