Page 159 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

to a plurality of sources and perspectives in religious education it “may open up new horizons and enlarge the inclusiveness of a certain perspective” (Wardekker and Miedema 2001b, 77). A central role for the life experiences of students in religious education fosters the dialogue (Schreiner 2006b; Jackson 2004). But a central role of one specific religious tradition seems to limit this dialogue and encounter.
2.3. A democratic practice
We discovered how school values concerning religious diversity and religious
education are related. The relation concerns the first two aspects of our research
question: what is the identity of Dutch cooperation schools and how do teachers
express the identity in religious education? A third important aspect of our research
was the question whether the religious education at cooperation schools meets the 7 requirements of a democratic, plural society. We contributed to the reflection of
this coherence and to the improvement of value-based religious education at a cooperation school in two ways.
First, we conducted a participatory action research in which teachers of one cooperation school designed an experimental celebration, expressing the value of dialogue. Their challenge was to shape a new practice of religious education that offers a direction for resolving the discrepancy between school values and the lived practice. In this new practice the characteristics of dialogue should play an important role. The resulting educational practice told us more about the motivation for and content of religious activities involving plurality and dialogue. In the participatory action research process that led to the experiment, we intentionally and repeatedly introduced the concept of dialogue to reflect on. By doing so we made clear how this concept is interpreted and developed by the teachers. In this stage of our research we emphasized dialogue as an important aspect of religious education in a plural setting. We did so based on the two theoretical perspectives that underline the importance of dialogue, as described in 2.2. We concluded that a practice of dialogue can be organized in line with school values, that dialogue as a conversational process between students with different views can be organized, but that the expression of dialogue in practice is limited: there was no focus on any central existential theme that is explored by a variety of perspectives and the dialogue is not moderated professionally.
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
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