Chapter 8 150 to focus more on ‘thinking from the heart’ (Dutch: kerndenken) instead of ‘thinking from the borders’ (Dutch: grensdenken) (Rottier, 2014). It would not be easy to make this shift in thinking, because the differences between and within church denominations regularly cause much turmoil, and these differences relate to what is central for believers in their life and their perceived afterlife (cf. Section 3.4). Moreover, some within orthodox Protestant communities are also fighting against increasing heterogeneity (cf. Exalto, 2017). It therefore seems valuable to pay attention to teachers’ roles in religious socialisation in both preservice and inservice teacher education (see Chapter 7 and Chapter 8.1). The aim is for teachers to have clear ideas about the uniqueness of their role and be able to approach challenges with regard to the school’s internal diversity. Second, if it is precisely in the school that those mutual differences can be used to teach pupils how to deal with religious and other diversity, then it is important to have an eye for the big picture, as can be clearly seen in scholarly work into global citizenship education. Banks (2004) describes in that context that cultural, national and global identifications are interrelated in a developmental way. He argues that pupils cannot develop thoughtful and clarified national identifications until they have reflective and clarified cultural identifications, and national identification is then needed for a global identification. This also relates to what MacMullen (2004) and Merry (2005) point out about the value of primary socialisation (see Section 6.5). However, these scholars perceive dealing with internal differences definitely not as the end but as a starting point. Based on my research, it is doubtful whether sufficient attention is given to the increasing range inwhichpupils learn to relate to religious differences in primary and secondary education. Primary school teachers assume that their pupils will face more religious differences after primary school (e.g. the quotation of Anna in Section 4.7). However, when it comes to the main contribution of teacher education, alumni and teacher educators still indicate that it is important for future teachers to learn to relate to internal religious diversity—apparently they didn’t learn that enough in secondary education. It is likewise shown that teacher education would improve with more attention to external religious diversity (see Sections 7.7 and 8.1). I therefore believe it would be helpful if already in secondary education pupils discovered more about what they are now learning as future teachers, namely to compare their own views with those of others, and came to understand that they can have respect for each other without having to abandon their own views.83 Teacher educationprogrammes could then focusmoreondealing external religious diversity. 83 Interestingly, the recent study of De Bruin-Wassinkmaat (2021) on the religious identity development of emerging adults raised in strictly Reformed contexts in the Netherlands highlights the importance of allowing young people to make their own choices. They need to be stimulated by Reformed parents and others to explore and make choices, even if this means that they reject their upbringing’s beliefs and practices.
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