Page 66 - TWO OF A KIND • Erik Renkema

CHAPTER 3
At cooperation schools, a secular view on religious school identity and on religious education meets a religious view (Renkema, Mulder and Barnard 2016). This is a specific phenomenon of diversity as it becomes visible in religious practices of the school. Instead of an encounter between different religious traditions, in cooperation schools a fusion of a secular and a religious world view is exerted in practice. The institutional policy of two schools with their specific identity and view on religious education are joined together in a new school. This is a school that defines its own identity in relation to the practice of religious education. This invites us to examine this practice: “The everyday reality of the teacher who works in a classroom composed of students from heterogenous religious backgrounds is the direct and most important motive to contemplate the question of how to deal with diversity” (Bakker 2004, 12). Our main interest is to investigate how we can describe the relationship between this moment of contemplation and key values stated in formal documents of the cooperation school and of its teachers. With this description we learn more about the way this specific institutional diversity is expressed in religious education.
3.2. Sampling of the school
In order to answer the aforementioned question, we conducted an instrumental case study (Stake 2005) at a cooperation school in the north of the Netherlands, situated in a rural area. It is the only school in the village. In the summer of 2012, the two existing schools (one public and one Protestant) merged to become the present one, which is attended by 115 students on average.
The largest group of students has no religious affiliation, and the students that do have a religious affiliation are almost all Christian.
There are eleven teachers and one principal, and there is a balance in the teachers’ backgrounds, including a combination of Protestant and public. School documents (also confirmed by the respondents in the interviews) indicate that all teachers are obliged to offer a moment of contemplation, every day, using the guideline entitled Trefwoord (§4.2.1). They are free to choose the time of the day for this moment.Besides this form of religious education, teachers and parents of the school organise festivities to celebrate Christmas or Easter for all students and teachers. We selected this school according to two criteria:
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