Page 47 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

MERGING IDENTITIES. EXPERIMENTS IN DUTCH PRIMARY EDUCATION
that concern the specific situation of primary schools, the class teachers and the
educational goals that only apply to primary education. 2
We will answer the question about the religious identity of the cooperation school and the motivations and organization of religious education in the empirical part of this article.
4. Empirical research of the identity of cooperation schools
In this section we present the results of an online survey among the principals of cooperation schools for primary education in The Netherlands. To map the whole field of cooperation schools we have chosen for an online survey among all these schools. In this way we were able to reach all the schools in a relatively short period of time. Our objective is to gather a deeper understanding of their integrated and the restricted identity.
4.1. Design
The first step of our empirical research was to design a questionnaire, based on three sources. In the first place, it was based on the theoretical study of the integrated and restricted identity of public and non-government education and of cooperation schools. A second basis was the information received from representatives of the national center of Christian education (Besturenraad) and of the association of public schools (VOS/ABB). From these representatives and from a random search on the internet the names of ten cooperation schools were found. The study of the school directory of these schools and the dialogue with two principals formed the third basis of the questionnaire.
A draft of this questionnaire was sent to the representative of VOS/ABB, the chairman of joined Christian primary schools in the province of Zeeland and a principal of one of the ten schools. Their feedback was included in the final version of the questionnaire.
For the second step in our research, we selected the specific cooperation schools that originated from a merger of a public school and one or more non-government schools, based on a formal list of all primary schools, supplied by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The schools for special educational needs were left out in the selection because their regional function can motivate the merger in
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