Page 145 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

DUTCH COOPERATION SCHOOLS AS DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITIES
answers in the plenary assembly. The celebration ends with a drawing assignment that the students can do individually, in pairs or as a group. They are asked to draw their perceptions of one of the fragments that has been shown or read.
In this example from our participatory action research we recognize elements of a practice of community that enhances dialogue as an expression of encounter between students from different backgrounds.
Our fourth notion relates to Dewey’s psychological aspect of democratic education.
Learning from experience is a key concept of in Dewey’s work. In our research,
we also detected the valuation of the respondents of focusing on students’ life 6 experiences in the moments of contemplation and the celebrations (Renkema,
Mulder and Barnard 2017, 2018b).
In this respect, there is a similarity between Dewey’s perspective and that of the respondents. However, our empirical findings show an emphasis on stories and other contents of Christian tradition, more than on students’ life experiences, in religious education (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2017, 2018a). Cooperation schools face the challenge of enhancing the emphasis on students’ life experiences in religious education. Implementing this means that dialogue and encounter are fostered as central characteristics of the identity of cooperation schools: students identify more with these experiences, which stimulates dialogue.
It also means that equality, another central value of the schools (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2016), is expressed by focusing on these experiences, which are all worth exploring.
In religious education, students and teachers explore these life experiences and especially the “actual religious quality in the experience ... [as] ... the better adjustment in life and its conditions” (Dewey 1934, 14).
When cooperation schools implement this focus on the religious dimension of experience, they have to work towards a curriculum that is less oriented towards the knowledge of Christian traditions, or indeed, of a variety of faith traditions. Teaching into or teaching about one or more traditions is replaced by the creation of “an interpretative transformational process” (Sutinen, Kallioniemi and Pihlström
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