Page 139 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

DUTCH COOPERATION SCHOOLS AS DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITIES
educational philosophy and that is considered to be relevant to contemporary views on religious education (Webster 2009). We recognize a substantive parallel between his perspective and the values that our respondents underline for educating their students. Their value of students co-existing in the encounter of differences bears a strong resemblance to Dewey’s perception of a school as a “miniature community” (1899, 15).
Second, in our previous research we recommended that teachers organize concrete
practices of dialogue that facilitate expression of encounter between students from
confessional and non-affiliated educations (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2017).
Much Dewey scholarship continues to emphasize his plea for this sort of concrete 6 acting as still relevant for democratic and interreligious education (Sutinen,
Kallioniemi and Pihlström 2015; Ghiloni 2011; Berding and Miedema 2007). Theoretical views (Ghiloni 2011; Sutinen, Kallioniemi and Pihlström 2015; Webster 2009) also raise a third point that shows Dewey’s views to be relevant for contemporary education in pluralistic contexts. Ghiloni shows that Dewey’s perspective can prevent religious education from becoming theoretical, occupied with metaphysical exploration, “without any critical grasp of its meaning and function” (2011, 484) by embracing Dewey’s view that “the natural center of interreligious education is not religious belief but life experience” (2011, 484). Dewey’s emphasis on life experience in religious education shows a strong connection to an important result in our research: our respondents’ valuation of the dialogue about students’ life experiences in religious education that aims at encounter and mutual understanding. Living together in democratic societies is fostered when religion is “brought down to earth, to what is ‘common’ between human beings” (Sutinen, Kallioniemi and Pihlström 2015, 335). Religious educators that work with religious and non-religious students can still benefit from Dewey’s focus on common life experiences that “must be able to transcend this divide” (Webster 2009, 97).
With these three points of resemblance between Dewey’s views and contemporary literature we see a firm debate about education toward democratic ends. As demonstrated above, modern theory endorsing the education of students in democratic values is inspired by Dewey’s perspective. In this modern theory the democratic aim is a distinctive characteristic of education. We recognize this aim in the aforementioned publications of Webster (2009), Sutinen, Kallioniemi and
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