Chapter 7 126 has the most conservative student population. At DCU, the curriculum for the primary school teacher education programme consists of a track for personal development, a pedagogical-didactical track, and a track for primary school subjects (Driestar educatief, n.d.). The institute aims to shape the teaching profession inspired by the Bible (Driestar educatief, n.d., para 2). Four focus groups were conducted, two with alumni and two with teacher educators. We chose focus groups because they lend themselves to exploring topics (cf. Smithson, 2012) and the interactions between participants can provide in-depth insights into consensus and disagreement (cf. Evers and De Boer, 2012; Morgan and Hoffman, 2018). We took into account the ethical guidelines and the guidelines of data management for scientific research at Dutch universities (DANS, 2015; VSNU, 2005, 2012). 7.3 Participants In 2020, 969 students were enrolled in the primary school teacher education programme at DCU (Driestar educatief, 2021). Students and staff had a predominantly orthodox Protestant background. Table 1 and Table 2 show the compositions of the focus groups. The focus groups with alumni involved teachers working at OPPSs to which there is a steady outflow from DCU. The first two schools that were approached responded positively. The contact persons at these schools assembled focus groups by inviting all his/her colleagues that were DCU alumni and graduated less than six years ago. For the focus groups with teacher educators, an invitation was posted twice on the online staff platformand teacher educators were alerted by email. Eight teacher educators responded positively (positive response of 11%; ultimately one was unable to participate). Most of them had identifiable affinities with the topic, for example, because of responsibility for internationalization or experience with multicultural education. The teacher educators were divided into two groups with as many different departments represented per group as possible. All participants signed an informed consent form. Table 1 Composition of the alumni focus groups Focus group 1 Focus group 2 Number of teachers 3 female, 2 male 4 female Current grades of teachers’ pupils71 1, 5, 6, 6, 8 4, 6, 6, 6 Years of work experience 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 0, 0, 2, 2 71 Grade 1 (4-years-old pupils) and grade 8 (12-years-old pupils) are the first and last year of primary school in the Netherlands.
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