Appendices 255 Appendix VI. Conversation Guide Teacher Educators (full version)127 Conversation guide Research Teachers, Religious Diversity and Teacher Education MAIN RESEARCH QUESTION: To what extent do newly qualified teachers feel/know they are competent to act in situations where internal or external religious diversity plays a role and how could the teacher education programme contribute to this according to newly qualified teachers and teacher educators, particularly in terms of stimulating inquisitiveness in pupils? • Always be friendly; • Thank you for your input; • Identify what you want to know further. Introduction 5 minutes We are pleased to be able to hold this focus group discussion with you, because as you have read, we want to involve two groups in our research: beginning teachers who are alumni of our teacher education program, and you as teacher educators. We are very curious about your ideas. If you can characterize society as religiously diverse and our own [orthodox Protestant] ‘group’ is a minority, the question arises as to how you train students in terms of philosophical diversity and how they, in turn, teach their pupils. It is precisely because of the particularity of Christian Reformed education that diversity is an issue. At Driestar we find the formation of students important. We are interested in your ideas about formation on this specific theme. We heard beautiful stories of how experiences at the college have been important for the teachers, and some suggestions were made of how things could be done even better. It is not only about what happens at the teacher education college in a subject such as Religious Education, but also for example in language lessons, or Maths, or History; because [essential] differences between people come into view everywhere. And what do you do then? And what do you do when it concerns an existential issue? In the interviews I conducted for my doctoral research, it turned out that the dilemmas teachers face with those small [inner-Christian] or larger [different religions] differences are actually extensions of each other. And it surprised us how, when we talked about other religions, we often ended up back at inner-Christian differences as well. 127 Original in Dutch; translation by the author.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw