Summary 159 school characteristics because the particular characteristics of mono-religious schools are the starting point of this study. Selection criteria were the school’s denomination, the size of the town and the number of orthodox Protestants living in that town. Additionally, all schools are located in a radius of 50 kilometres around Utrecht, including only a maximum of one school in the same place. For each unique combination of selection criteria, a school has been randomly selected, and the teacher of grade 5 or grade 4 has been invited to participate. In total, 47 schools were approached, resulting in 15 participating schools. Three of the identified categories could not be represented in the sample. Sixteen teachers of 15 different schools participated in this research: Adam, Anna, Danïel, Emma, Femke, Floris, Gijs, Hugo, Jan, Jasmijn, Lieke, Luuk, Nora, Ruben, Sanne and Teun (names have been changed). Lieke and Sanne are teachers at the same school and only wanted to participate if they could be interviewed together. The teachers came from seven Reformed schools, four Reformed Liberated schools and five Protestant schools, of which at least seven have an open admission policy for pupils. There were seven women and nine men, and they were, on average, 35 years old. Most teachers worked (almost) fulltime, and on average they had over 11 years of teaching experience. At the time of the interviews, half of the teachers worked at the school where they had started their teaching career. All teachers have been educated at Christian universities. The participants considered themselves representative of orthodox Protestant education. Almost all declared that the Christian faith is very important to them and most participants are very actively or actively involved in their churches. All participants were confessing church members, spread over five different church denominations. All participants indicated that they feel themselves at home in the orthodox Protestant climate. Participants of the focus group study There were two focus groups with alumni and two focus groups with teacher educators of DCU. For the focus groups with alumni, purposeful sampling was used to select two primary schools to which there is a steady outflow from DCU. For each school a separate focus group was formed. The contact persons at these schools were asked to invite those who had graduated less than five years ago. The first focus group consisted of five participants (three female, two male), who had on average six years’ working experience. The second group consisted of four participants (all female), with an average of one year of teaching experience. For the focus groups with teacher educators, a convenience sample was used. An invitation to participate was posted twice on the online staff platform and all teacher educators were alerted by email. In the end, seven teacher educators participated and most of them had identifiable affinities with the topic. The
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