Page 113 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

The teachers of the school that was chosen faced the challenge of designing and implementing a dialogical practice while having little or no experience with dialogue
between students from non-affiliated education as well as Christian education. They
always have segregated moments of contemplation and the collective celebrations
consist of presentations without interaction about religious subjects (Renkema,
Mulder and Barnard 2018). At the end of every week, students from both general
and Christian education present to each other what they have learned that week. The
school calls this a celebration. In the context of the research question, we chose to 5 design a new kind of celebration in which dialogue was implemented. The teachers
involved chose to create this new practice for their students aged 8-12 years old. The school is the result of a merger between a public school and a Protestant school in 1995. In 1993, four taskforces were created to develop the profile of the new school. One of the taskforces was concerned with identity and religious values. This taskforce described her objective concerning religious education as the aim to “find/have/attain a coherent whole of religious education in which encounter will be central” (RCICS 1993, Attachment 4, 3). This meant that themes for religious education have to be worked out from the perspectives of all religious backgrounds.
Currently, students are either non-affiliated or Protestant. A small minority of the students are Muslim or Roman Catholic. The importance of the encounter between these students and the focus on diversity are stressed in the school board’s policies. The board’s mission statement says that the school respects differences and that encounter takes place between children from different backgrounds. The policy of the board also relates this value of encounter to the societal mission of education as it comes to paying active attention to diversity of and active citizenship by the students.The school’s history, the school board’s mission statement, the school website and the school guide outline its vision for religious education, expressing the school identity as an “encounter school”: “a school where teachers, students, parents from various religious backgrounds work together and have joint responsibility for education and upbringing” (school guide 2014-2018, 4).
A PILOT STUDY
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