Page 15 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

3. Research question and research aims 1
A former public school and a former nongovernment school are faced with the challenge of creating an identity for a new school that teachers, parents and students can identify with. In the merging process, many discussions are held between teachers and parents about the core values of the school and the organization of religious education. These topics are extremely important in the process of the merger, because each of the merging schools was based on its specific values and had its own religious education, and each school had its unique characteristics. Teachers, students and parents all contribute their own way of life, while teachers embrace their own value-based view on educating children. This is the typical, plural setting of our research. Both sets of value-based characteristics come together in a school that needs to develop views and practices in which the identity and values of the former schools are incorporated, and in which shared values are discovered. The joining of these distinct identities can lead to discussions about e.g. common values, the coherence between the school values, the personal values and the organization of religious education, and the way religious education needs to be organized. Questions are raised, like: Do the students need to be separated according the lines of the schools? Do all students have to be educated together in religious education? How can practices of Christian religious education be ensured? What are the available options for the Christmas celebration? These questions motivated our investigation of the praxis of cooperation schools. We focused our research on teachers as key figures in the construction of practices that resemble the school identity. They are the professionals who organize education, they make everyday decisions concerning the design and creation of religious education as a possible expression of school values. The teachers are the only representatives of cooperation schools who can demonstrate and motivate the coherence between values and practice. Therefore, it was relevant to study their motives for teaching the way they do. After all, “it is teachers who in the end, will change the world of school by understanding it” (Stenhouse 1981, 104). The central research question is:
What is the identity of Dutch cooperation schools, how do teachers express the identity in religious education, and how does the education meet the requirements of a democratic, plural society?
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
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