Page 160 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 7
Second, we contributed to the reflection of the coherence between school values and religious education by incorporating Dewey’s concept of democracy. We added this concept because it supports the debate about the lack of consistency between school values and educational practice with a theoretical view on values that are the basis of cooperation schools and with concrete suggestions for enhancing the values-based and dialogical practice of religious education. We recognized the parallel between Dewey’s dominant focus on education in the context of plurality and acting as a community (Biesta and Miedema 1999), encounter and equality as key values of cooperation schools and our focus as researchers on values that we described as democratic in chapter 6. By choosing these democratic values we take position by identifying schools (and cooperation school in particular) as embryonic communities in which students can learn from each other and can develop to become respectful human beings and are willing to encounter a diversity of perspectives (Sutinen, Kallioniemi, and Pihlström 2015; Webster 2009; Knight 1998).
3. Answers to the research question
3.1. Empirical answers
Our research investigated the following question: 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?
We showed our main findings in the previous section. We answer our research question by stating that respondents and documents of the cooperation schools find it important that their students learn to understand each other and learn to live together, respecting differences: we have noted this as the social perspective of cooperation schools. We detected a strong focus on encounter and equality as main values, in the context of the unique diversity of these schools. The emphasis on these values is a significant commonality of the investigated cooperation schools. Concerning the organization of religious education and the expression of the value of equality in this education we noticed a focus on the Christian tradition, in different forms of religious education. We asked questions about the coherence between this focus and the value of equality and the correlation with the plurality in these schools and in society. We also detected a discrepancy between dialogue, as an important way of expressing the value of encounter, and the concrete practices
158