Kinderen en God verteld in verhalen

Abstract

The Netherlands have a long tradition of immigration. After the Second World War (1939-1945) immigration has been dominated by ‘guest workers’. Mainly from Turkey and Morocco, young men came to Western Europe to join the labour force working for the rehabilitation of the various countries. As it turned out the ‘guest workers’ stayed far longer in The Netherlands than would have been expected. ‘Guest workers’ turned into ‘immigrants’ and from ‘alien Dutchmen’ they become ‘fellow-countrymen’ and finally members of an ‘ethnic minority’. This process of changing names reflects the change in appreciation of the newcomers by the indigenous people of the Netherlands.

The changes in the composition of the Dutch population and the development of what is called the ‘ideological border-contacts’ lead to the formulation of our research question: Does the Juliana van Stolberg School and its three year method of inter-religious education create the necessary conditions for mental processes that favour religious development and more specifically the development of the God concept for its indigenous and immigrant pupils? This research question is answered by means of a qualitative study amongst the pupils of the two primary schools. Since the object of our study, being the religious development of both Christian and Islamic pupils in a multicultural and inter-religious educational context is a new field of study, qualitative research methods were selected to conduct the study.

After we have explained the research design in the first chapter we describe in the second chapter the consequences of the more permanent settlement of people from another culture on the nature of Dutch society. Initially the Dutchman is the ‘host’. The third chapter is spent on the changes in the educational system resulting from the permanent settlement in the Netherlands of people from other culturesThe arrival of foreign pupils gives schools food for thought. The Protestant and Roman Catholic schools consider how to cope with this new group of children and especially how to cope with the ‘other’-ness in faith of these children. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the changes in thinking about God. Communication about God is situated within the frame of reference of the Christian and Islamic tradition. In the fifth chapter the concepts of education and development are central. Educators support their children in various ways by providing them with knowledge to participate as an able and skilled citizen in society. We distinguish different educational styles with both Dutch and Turkish or Moroccan parents. In religious development we first distinguish the retrospective approach, studying the process of development from the perspective of the end-‘product’ such as the God concept in adulthood. Secondly we consider the prospective approach, studying development with an open perspective to change with respect to the self defined starting situation. Research into religious development has brought forward the formulation of a number of theories on the relevant domain of development. We discuss the theories of Goldman, Fowler and Oser and Gmünder. We present a number of studies into religious development from a bird’s eye perspective and elaborate on three of them: the study of Goldman in England, that of Tamminen in Finland and Hutsebaut’s study in Belgium. The design as well as the results of these research projects inspired our own study which we place in their research-tradition. In the sixth chapter we describe different approaches to religious education. For each of the three models of religious education a school will be described as an example. The seventh chapter we present the results of our researchproject. In chapter eight, the last chapter, we discuss our results. Also we make some recommendations for further research. In a situation where Muslims and Christians risk being brought into an opposed or polarised situation, the results of this study provide an interesting reference for education in the context of the multicultural and multi-religious Netherlands society