This study was inspired by an inclusive intercultural perspective on education, and developed empirical knowledge concerning the intercultural professional development of in-service teachers. The study was conducted during the first year of a newly-designed master's programme that focused on "education for refugees". In the Netherlands master's programmes in education qualify inservice teachers to contribute to school development, together with giving them a specialisation in a specific topic. The findings were based on the teachers' written work, and interviews with the teacher educators. They show that the intercultural professional identity of the teachers was developed by a combination of pedagogical approaches. These include the following: new knowledge from an inclusive intercultural perspective, critical socio-cultural self-examination, real encounters with newly-arrived refugees, and a reflective, intervention-based approach to professional learning and curriculum renewal. The intervention-based approach turned out to be the most important for the teachers' agency in intercultural school development. The challenges experienced concern mono-cultural practices in mainstream education for refugees, together with the dominance of an instrumentalist approach to teaching and learning. Windesheim University is a large university of professional studies situated in a medium-sized city in the east of the Netherlands. The department of education of this university includes educational research and teacher education (ba and ma). Over 500 students study for a master's degree. The 19 specialisations offered vary from learning & innovation to religious education and education for newcomers. The University of Humanistic Studies is a small university situated in one of the major cities of the Netherlands.
The goals of citizenship education are often contested in Protestant schools with an ethnically heterogeneous population of pupils in multicultural European societies today. This is connected to the tension between the inclusive goal of citizenship for a pluralistic world and the exclusive goal of education in the Christian faith. This paper presents an explorative study on citizenship education. It describes the opinions of teachers and parents on the selection and use of children's literature in Dutch 'liberal' Protestant primary schools. The results show that most teachers favour the avoidance of books that might not fit in with the Protestant identity of the school or possibly raise objections from orthodox parents. There is considerable diversity in the positions parents take on the issue.
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