Page 146 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 6
2015, 341) by bringing in “intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together” (Dewey 1897, 1). In this line, it is noteworthy that in our participatory action research we found an absence of any reference to one or more religious traditions during the experimental celebration.
Teachers at the participating cooperation school also mentioned this as a point of improvement and expressed the desire to pay more attention to religious content. In this process, teachers show stories and other content from a variety of traditions to the students with the intention of contemplating and discussing life experiences in the traditions. This focus on experiences in the resources makes it possible for students to relate to them. These external stimuli are introduced into an interpretative dialogue with the students’ experiences and the religious dimension of those experiences. This way of dealing with religious sources and language does not imply a movement toward the use of secular content and language. In democratic education, dialogue about the personal experiences of students in relation to a variety of traditions can add to the encounter between non-affiliated students and students from a confessional background. In this way we can combine Dewey’s (and the teachers’) plea for the attention for religious experience in religious education with the teachers’ desire to pay attention to the content of a diversity of traditions and develop practices in which the dialogue about personal experiences of students in relation to traditions is organized.
5. Practices of democracy
Using the analogy between the key values of cooperation schools and Dewey’s view on democracy in education, we can sketch an outline of possible concrete practices of religious education at these schools. We make four suggestions, in which we also refer to empirical findings of our previous research.
First, schools that speak highly of living together and encounter and dialogue, such as the cooperation schools we investigated, can apply these principles to practices of commonality. In these Deweyan practices, communication is the central concept. It is this communication “which insures participation in a common understanding is one which secures similar emotional and intellectual dispositions” (Dewey 1980, 7). It is through communication, or dialogue, as we refer to it in our research, that a democratic means of encounter between students
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