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THE NETHERLANDS
Since the family reunion of the guest workers in Holland during the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century, intercultural education has been a topic in Dutch research on education. Intercultural education became an obligatory subject-matter in 1985 for every elementary school too. With the reunion of Turkish and Moroccan family?s Muslim children also gradually entered the open denominational schools and in large and growing numbers. Due to this phenomenon, interreligious education was added as a point of special interest for intercultural education in denominational, that is Catholic and Protestant, schools. The foundation of the first and only interreligious school in the Netherlands, the Juliana van Stolberg School (1989-2003), has given an extra impetus to the research on inter-religious and intercultural education, at the theoretical as well as at the empirical level. At Utrecht University, starting with the work of Prof. Trees Andree and continued by Prof. Cok Bakker, research has focused upon the situation in the classroom . Topics in various qualitative research projects of the Utrecht group have been ?the perception of otherness of the other in the classroom? and curriculum development for interreligious learning . In the Netherlands, research has been carried out on the effects of interreligious learning . More recently the focus at Utrecht University has shifted more towards the context of the school in dialogical learning (school identity) and the biographical aspects of the teacher, teaching intercultural and inter-religious lessons in Christian schools, in a classroom characterized by ethnic and religious diversity. The focus of the research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Faculty of Psychology and Education is Education is focussing on intercultural and inter-religious learning at the theoretical level and is part of a large interdisciplinary university wide project with researchers form the faculties of Law, Philosophy, Social Sciences, and Theology. The empirical research is firstly related to the identity of the schools in the pillarized educational system in the Netherlands. An extensive conceptual analysis carried out in the Amsterdam group on the concept of identity was of use here . Research outcomes on the expectations of parents and teachers in relation to the (inter-religious) education colleges and schools with different identities have also proven helpful. The second strand of research focuses on how children are stimulated and fostered in the school in toto and in their class of group, to reflect on and act together along the lines of human solidarity, that is of living and acting respectfully together. |
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