Page 35 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

It could therefore be concluded that there is a strong correspondence between the 1 values of public education and those of the cooperation schools investigated here.
Chapter 2 answers the question of how these schools construct their identity
and the implications of this identity for how religious education is organized.
The chapter raises several issues that were very important to the case studies that followed. First, we see that cooperation schools underline key values of equality and encounter, and the mission of living together based on these values. We also detect that the respondents acknowledge both public as well as nongovernment education in the organization of their religious education. Third, segregation of religious education according to the religious origins of the merged schools appears to be a specific feature of most schools. Armed with these conclusions concerning the school values and the related religious education, we entered phase 2 (Chapter 3). Chapter 3 presents the results of a single case study. We chose this specific school as a model for the minority of schools that we detected in phase 1: the schools that provide collective religious education for all students. The research question is how key values of the school and of its teachers are exerted in this religious education. We explored the concrete and everyday practice of religious education in a cooperation school and the perceptions of the school values by the teachers. We have included their perceptions, since they are the professionals responsible for the organization of (religious) education. This chapter shows the results from a content analysis of interviews and videos of the ‘moment of contemplation’, looking at how this practice relates to the key values of the school. We noted that respondents and the school guide speak highly of the social objective of education, and of religious education in particular: working and living together based on respect and encounter. We also noted that dialogue, as a way of expressing this value of encounter, is hardly practiced in their religious education. Respondents state that they value the attention for students’ life experiences in religious education, a value that we scarcely detect in the video recordings. At the end of this chapter, we ask how religious content (in most cases Christian tradition) should be recognizable in religious education and formal documents in a cooperation school. In Chapter 4, we present the results of case studies at four cooperation schools that were studied in phase 3. The data and the analysis describe how teachers deal with the specific religious diversity in rituals: moments of contemplation and celebrations. In this chapter, we investigate the question of how teachers at cooperation schools express school values and their vision on encounter and dialogue, both in segregated moments of contemplation and in the organization
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
33