Page 136 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 6
Several authors plead for the coordination of values of pedagogy, didactics and philosophy of life that are present in schools (Ter Avest et al. 2007). For this coordination to take place, it is important that the teachers are given the opportunity to express their own interpretations of school values and how these interpretations influence the daily practice of education (Bakker and Ter Avest 2005).
The second challenge for schools in western societies is dealing with diversity in society and in the classroom (Ipgrave 2004). Religious and intercultural education play an especially important role in this plural setting (Schreiner 2006a). Milot states that this education aims for the student’s “openness to diversity” and for “uniting citizens beyond their moral and religious differences and disagreements” (2006, 15).
When a public, neutral school and a non-government, confessional school merge to become a new entity, the principals, teachers, parents and students of this cooperation school are challenged to reflect on the common values of the new school’s identity. The motives for and organization of religious education must also be considered.
In previous research, we investigated the relationship between the common values of school identity and religious education in cooperation schools. In our empirical research, we first mapped the field by means of an online questionnaire. After an analysis of the questionnaire, we conducted five case studies. The studies revealed underlying views, values and beliefs, their coherence (or lack thereof), and their relationship with the existing practice of religious education. We used both a single case study (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2017) as well as a multiple-case study (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2018a). In the final empirical phase, we designed a participatory action research study to detect what motivations and challenges teachers face when they are asked to create an experimental celebration (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2018b).
In the empirical results of our previous research, we recognize the first challenge we described above: the reflection on the relation between school identity and the practice of religious education. We see that this reflection hardly leads to a congruent whole between cooperation school values and religious education. All
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