Page 162 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 7
Therefore, we underline our statement in our introduction chapter: the coherence between school values on the one hand and the practice of (religious) education on the other hand is a main challenge of every school but especially of the cooperation school. In the line of the results of our research in the participating schools we contribute to the coherence between values and religious education by analyzing the teachers’ design of such a practice of encounter. Our results help us understand why and how teachers deal with their values in religious education in a context of plurality.
Our second contribution concentrates on the specific and unique plurality in classes of cooperation schools. In publications on encounter in religious education we found a focus on dialogue between students from different confessional backgrounds and affiliations (Vermeer 2004; Valk 2017; Rautionmaa and Kallioniemi 2017). In these publications the authors promote religious education that aims at seeking out and comparing “common positions, around which the variety of faiths, spiritual traditions and non-religious traditions can develop common thinking and action towards common goals” (Rautionmaa and Kallioniemi 2017, 153).
However, in most schools in the Netherlands and especially in cooperation schools many students are non-affiliated: they are not socialized in any confessional tradition at all. Our research contributes to theoretical views about interfaith education and the encounter between representants of confessional traditions by focusing on the values, the content and the organization of religious education that aims at the encounter between students from a non-affiliated background and those with a confessional background. We have seen that underlying values are very much similar compared to the values of interfaith education but that the content and the organization differs in some practices of cooperation schools. Our third contribution to the current theoretical discourse is the reflection on the concrete dialogical practices. As Rautionmaa and Kallioniemi point out there “is an obvious lack of theoretical reflection about what inter-worldview dialogue involves at the school level” (2017, 156). Our research fills this theoretical gap by showing what teachers do in the concrete practice of the inter-worldview dialogue and how they motivate their practices. We show what is done when teachers of cooperation schools practice what theoretical views emphasize, in the line of Dewey: organizing concrete practices of dialogue in order to facilitate encounter as being relevant for democratic and interreligious education (Sutinen, Kallioniemi
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