Page 164 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 7
research among other stakeholders of cooperation schools: the students and the parents. Students always are the object of education and religious education in particular and parents are mentioned as a reason for organizing religious education the way it is. Involving these groups will provide us with more understanding of their perception of the school values and the way they translate these values to concrete practices of (religious) education. Will they interpret these values in another way or will they bring in other characteristics of religious education than the professionals do? In a concrete sense this will mean that students and parents will also participate in participatory action research that leads to a practice that expresses their interpretation. Moreover, involving students in further research will tell us more about their unique and personal religious views: what can we say about the articulation of their religious views that are put forward in dialogue? In our research we divided students of cooperation school into two groups: Christian and non-affiliated. However, we are aware of the spectrum between these two views. Every class of a cooperation school is a plural group that cannot be divided into only two distinct groups that are very much separated from each other. Every student develops his own religious view. However, in our research we investigated the common practice and wishes of cooperation schools and their stakeholders that are characterized by a clear distinction into two identities: a non-affiliated that corresponds with the former public school and a Christian that resembles the merged Christian school. Finally, further research should aim at the religious experience of students, not as an alternative for the attention for religious traditions in classrooms, but as content that stimulates the process of giving meaning to traditions. In our participatory action research (chapter 5) we found an absence of any reference to one or more religious traditions during the experimental celebration. Teachers of this participating cooperation school also mentioned this as a point of improvement. Could it be that Dewey’s vision on religious experience in education can be complemented by a hermeneutical contribution of various religious traditions? We are curious how this hermeneutical contribution can be implemented in the practice of a cooperation school. This could contribute to our aforementioned statement that there is still much work to be done to promote religious education that aims at the encounter between non-affiliated students and students from a confessional background. Could the dialogue about personal experiences of students in relation to a variety of traditions add to this encounter? This way we can combine Dewey’s (and the teachers’) plea for the attention for religious
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