Page 155 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

and from Christian education we see that respondents and school documents speak highly of equality as an important condition for handling this diversity and for practicing encounter in education. Our empirical sources underline the value of equality for two reasons. We connect these reasons to theory about religious education in the context of plurality.
First, teachers, principals and school documents interpret their school as a place
where all students and teachers are regarded as equal and where no worldview
or religion determines all of the education, nor the admittance of students and
teachers. The cooperation school as a community and a place for living together
can only be expressed when all worldviews and perspectives are worth exploring
(Wright 2004; Mulder 2012) and every student and teacher feels invited to bring
in his or her view. Students and teachers are “challenged into incorporating those 7 perspectives into their own or their group’s understanding” (Elias 2010, 70).
Second, equality means also that the sources for religious education must become more and more plural. Equality as a value for cooperation schools implies, both in our data and in theory about religious education in heterogeneous settings, that no specific religious tradition or perspective plays a dominant role: as researchers we regard diversity as an opportunity to create dialogue between students and a variety of sources. This dialogue and variety are key components in the identity formation of students. When no tradition or perspective is dominant, also the ideas and beliefs of the teacher and the basic confession of the school are no longer the dominant content (Miedema 2000; Heimbrock 2009). The objective of religious education has changed: the “subjective religiosity of the student” (Van der Zee, Hermans, and Aarnoutse 2004, 80) is the centre of identity formation. This means that the student actively participates in a hermeneutic practice by giving meaning to religious content in relation to personal existential questions (Jackson 1997; Miedema 2000; Van der Zee, Hermans, and Aarnoutse 2004). The student is the center of religious education processes. We recognize this focus on students’ life experiences in our empirical data: teachers emphasize their objective to pay central attention to the worldview of their students in religious education.
A third finding is the connection that the respondents experience between the school values and their educational practice: they see their educational values and those of formal school documents expressed in religious education, which consists
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
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