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of the moments of contemplation and celebrations. Most of these practices were organized separately for students from secular education and students from Christian education. It seems that in most schools the distinction between the two former identities of the merged schools are maintained in religious education. We contributed to the coherence between values en religious education by implementing dialogue in a new experiment at one cooperation school by a participatory action research. In the final phase of our research we used Dewey’s concept of democracy in order to position cooperation schools as places where religious education fosters the identity development of students in a hermeneutical way and, by doing so, expresses the educational values of the cooperation schools in the context of a democratic, plural society.
3.2. Theoretical contribution 7 We conducted our research in the context of theory about religious education in
plural classes and about encounter and dialogue in these classes. These theoretical
insights structured our empirical instruments and our conclusions. Our findings
contribute to this theory and the current academic discourse about encounter in religious diverse classes. This contribution is threefold.
First, we started from the theoretical perspective that, especially in classrooms where diversity is apparent, there is “discrepancy between the official identity of the school as it is formulated in official documents, and every day practice” (Ter Avest et al. 2007, 250). Our research contributes to the current academic discourse on school identity, diversity and religious education (e.g. Faber 2012; Rautionmaa and Kallioniemi 2017; Ipgrave 2004) by elaborating on the values that the teachers of cooperation schools hold dear, how they motivate the coherence between their values and religious education and how they explain possible discrepancies between the values and this practice. Our research shows whether this discrepancy is visible in the practice of the cooperation school, how it is motivated and how concrete activities of teachers can develop practices that can resolve this discrepancy.
Our research develops a perspective on the (lack of) coherence between school values and the practice of religious education (Keast and Leganger-Krogstadt 2004). So, our research contributes to the current theoretical discourse about the relation between values and practice by showing that this specific pluralization of cooperation schools indeed influences this relation strongly.
CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION
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