C. Bakker

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

Friction in the classroom may create useful tension for teachers when they attempt to discuss sensitive topics as part of democratic learning. Due to the openness and indeterminacy of these topics, students can experience what it is like to be (political) subjects in a diverse society and become aware of other people’s subjectness in a charged clas...

Introduction With a shift in healthcare from diagnosis-centered to human- and interprofessional-centered work, allied health professionals (AHPs) may encounter dilemmas in daily work because of discrepancies between values of learned professional protocols and their personal values, the latter being a component of the personal dimension. The person...

This article presents the findings from a qualitative study on the religious identity exploration processes and experiences of emerging adults who grew up in strictly Reformed contexts in the Netherlands. We discuss three forms of exploration that appeared in our data: asking questions, exploring alternatives and rebelling against things that are d...

Religious identity development is highly influenced by contexts. This influence is even more powerful for young people who grew up in strict religious contexts because of the prominence of orthodox beliefs and practices in everyday life. This article presents which contextual factors were influential on the religious identity development of 18 emer...

This article presents a striking finding of our research into the religious identity commitments and process of religious identity development of emerging adults who grew up in strictly Reformed contexts in the Netherlands. We observed a recurrent theme in the life story accounts we studied. Almost all the participants expressed that they feel or f...

Research shows that teachers and educators struggle to act when conflict appears in the classroom. This article argues that (political) conflict should not be avoided or eradicated. Teachers should enable conflict and attend to their pupils in the process, in order to enable further understanding of each other and their differences, as part of livi...

Purpose The purpose of this paper aims to disclose shared beliefs and understandings about the concept of professionalism amongst Dutch commercial real estate valuers. It examines prevailing logics of action in a mature European valuation industry and reflects on the potential influence of these logics on the occurrence of judgement bias in valuati...

This qualitative study examines the religious identity commitments of 18 emerging adults who grew up in strictly Reformed contexts in the Netherlands. During in-depth narrative interviews with photo elicitation, the participants reflected on who they are and the meaning of religion to their identity. Our thematic data analysis reveals that the part...

This study explores how 33 student teachers’ reflections during 106 ‘bumpy moments’ while in an international student teaching internship reveal their professional beliefs, and how the moments make the student teachers reflect upon their subjective educational theories. Student teachers described four themes of professional beliefs: (1) pedagogical...

Citizenship education is an important part of current debates about future education. In contrast, educational philosopher Gert Biesta calls for a shift “from teaching citizenship to learning democracy”. This study wants to contribute to this shift. A Delphi-method is applied on a Dutch case study, presenting a way to collect and analyze data from...

Purpose Information verification is an important factor in commercial valuation practice. Valuers use their professional autonomy to decide on the level of verification required, thereby creating an opportunity for client-related judgement bias in valuation. The purpose of this paper is to assess the manifestation of client attachment risks in info...

Background: In the Netherlands, most of the academic curricula for teacher training in religious education (RE) focus on shortfalls of students, like a lack of knowledge about the plurality of worldviews and the diversity in interpretations of the Christian tradition. In our research project, the focus is not on the students, but on the university...

Strictly religious adolescents grow up in highly religious contexts with orthodox beliefs and practices that usually contrast with those of pluralist and secularized societies that can be perceived as promoting unhealthy religious identity development. For these adolescents, religious identity development may be a challenge; however, there seems to...

In the last decades, the perspective on leadership has shifted from a mandated to a more distributed understanding of leadership. Within distributed leadership, every single professional can move in and out of leadership roles regardless of their position. The focus is not only on the leaders themselves, including their normative stances, but also...

The aim of this paper is to examine valuer judgement behaviour, by exploring the manifestation of task complexity in Dutch commercial valuation practice. For this purpose, we adopted a grounded theory approach and undertook 18 in-depth interviews with senior valuation professionals across the Netherlands. Our findings indicate a strong presence of...

A boundary is a metaphor for an experience of discontinuity wherein a socio-cultural difference is perceived as a challenge or obstacle in action or interaction. This case study explores eight student teachers’ perceptions of boundaries during an international teaching internship to identify where experiences of professional learning originate. We...

This case study explored examples of pre-service teachers' learning when experiencing dis-continuity and (re)positioning themselves in various professional communities and cultures during an international teaching internship. Pre-service teachers' experiences of discontinuity were defined as boundary experiences, when challenging or problematic soc...

This interview study examines the attitudes of orthoprax young Muslim adults in the Netherlands toward their context, by distinguishing their perceptions of society and their participation in society. In this study, we discover that orthoprax young Muslim adults oppose themselves to Dutch society and do not feel really connected to it. However, mos...

Valuation judgement bias has been a research topic for several years due to its proclaimed effect on valuation accuracy. However, little is known on the emphasis of literature on judgement bias, with regard to, for instance, research methodologies, research context and robustness of research evidence. A synthesis of available research will establis...

This two-year longitudinal study explores how an earlier international teaching experience influences the way six newly qualified teachers perceive their current teaching practice and professional self-understanding during personally significant experiences. The concept of an experiential continuum, a key concept in these findings, suggests that ev...

In our research group ‘Normative Professionalisation’ – as the combined research group of Utrecht University and the HU University of Applied Sciences - we take the view that good education occurs when teachers master the required knowledge and skills together with a reflective awareness of their personal background. The leading idea is that sugges...

In the first section, we introduce the context and research questions of this particular project. The second section continues by describing main theories about religious education, the dialogical self, and normative professionalisation. As written, this research has a close link to a worldview educational minor programme which aims at a normative...

In our research we focus on the architectural characteristics of a location, seen as a precondition to appeal to the imaginative power of learners that plays a part in satisfying their (presupposed) spiritual hunger and longings for a better world. The concepts ‘space’, ‘non-place’ and ‘place’, in their relation to the concepts ‘place attachment’ a...

‘Critical incidents’ in the biography of principals appear to be steering in their innovative way of constructing InterReligious Education in their schools. In this contribution we present the biographical narratives of four principals: one principal introducing interreligious education in a christian school, and three principals constructing a way...

This volume, the result of four years of work performed by the combined research groups of Utrecht University (Faculty of Humanities) and the HU Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (Faculty of Education), focuses on the central theme of 'Normative Professionalization'. Drawing on a wide variety of scholars including Hannah Arendt, Gert Biesta, H...

This article focuses on moral authorship as an element of the professional development of novice teachers in the Netherlands. Moral authorship refers to the ability of teachers to observe, identify, verbalize and reflect on the moral aspects of their work in a proactive and dialogical manner. We elaborate on moral authorship by theoretically explor...

Social workers nowadays are confronted with recurrent issues about religion and spirituality when in contact with diverse client groups. This was also the case in the beginning of the profession around 1900, in Europe as well as in the US. This study analyses the work of a Dutch pioneer in social work, Marie Muller-Lulofs (1854–1954) and presents t...

In literature, co-teaching is mostly defined as an instrumental and pedagogical means delivered by collaborating special and regular teachers, from which students with and without special educational needs benefit in regular schools. The importance of a shared vision on the part of members of co-teaching teams as to what they consider as good educa...

For reasons which have to do with the phenomenon itself, complexity in teaching situations is difficult to research. Exactly because teaching situations can be that complicated, it is a hard job to get a grip on them.

In this book we explore how teachers deal with complex situations in their teaching practices. We do this from a researcher’s perspective. Our main interest is what theories we know and what methodologies we can use, to try to get a better understanding of the thinking, decision-making and actions of professional teachers.

In this final chapter we will now synthesize some significant aspects of the meaning of this book. The book advocates Normative Professionalization as an indispensable aspect of education in order to deal with the human condition – the complexity of the vita activa and the amor mundi; the love for the world (Arendt). According to Arendt, dealing wi...

"This volume, the result of four years of work performed by the combined research groups of Utrecht University (Faculty of Humanities) and the HU Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (Faculty of Education), focuses on the central theme of ‘Normative Professionalization’. Drawing on a wide variety of scholars including Hannah Arendt, Gert Biesta,...

In the post-pillarized society of the Netherlands, formal religious education still is structured according to religious dividing lines. “Religion” in confessional schools is a compulsory subject; in public schools, taking a so-called neutral position with regard to religious traditions, “Religion” is an optional subject (Protestant, Roman Catholic...

New spirituality has often been accused of being egocentric and thus lacking incentives for social engagement. The discussion on this subject is tangled because authors differ in specifying who they are writing about and what the criticism is. After seeking an adequate demarcation of the target group (people involved in new spirituality), we establ...

In this chapter, we explore the conceptions of spirituality in a large and representative sample (N = 2313) of the general population in the Netherlands. Spirituality is described mostly in cognitive terms (54%), especially in the form of general references to a transcendent reality (e.g., 'more between heaven and earth'). Experiential expressions...

In this article we focus on a newly developed Dutch method of introducing pupils and students into the religious dimension of the various subjects of the school curriculum. We call this method of Religious Education (RE): Lessons in Apprehension (LiA). The innovative aspect lies in the awareness of personal commitment in addition to knowledge about...

The present study shows that being ‘spiritual’ and being ‘religious’ are becoming different life orientations for a large part of the population. As far as we know, for the first time, a sample from an European country shows that these orientations are reflected in two coherent clusters of beliefs, experiences, and practices of what we call ‘new sp...

The aim of this article is to present a framework for studying the religious identity development of highly religious Christian and Muslim adolescents. Building on existing theories on identity development, the authors define highly religious Christian and Muslim adolescents as "orthoprax" adolescents and explore the consequences of this for reflec...

Being interested in the biography of teachers and the way their biographies influence professional I must admit, looking back at a period of 20 years of academic work, I can not deny that a specific focus, interest and emphasis are easy to distinguish, closely related to a subjectivity that is rooted in my own biography.

This paper focuses on teachers of secondary level religious education in England, Estonia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. It presents a study of the teachers' perceptions of and responses to the diversity within their classes, in relation to their professional role and their personal and professional biographies. The study employed bi...

School identity is the main topic of one of our qualitative research projects in Christian primary schools in the multicultural metropolitan context of the Netherlands. Together with school leaders and teachers of denominational Christian primary schools in the city of Rotterdam, we developed the concept of Structural Identity Consultation (SIC). S...

In this contribution we explore processes of Structural Identity Consultation (SIC) with primary school teachers, and the opportunities this kind of team meetings offers for a nontraditional way to live with religious tradition(s). We take our start in everyday classrooms, characterized by religious diversity. The thoughts of Levinas, and his view...

The last decade identity is often and very fruitfully conceptualized as “narrative identity.” Neither for individuals nor for groups is identity a given beforehand anymore. On the contrary, identity has to be constructed in an inductive way continuously. Three qualitative research methods are applied to explore in an inductive way the school's narr...

In the Netherlands the debate on the identity of a school is influenced by the long and dominant history of a close linking between religious traditions (mainly the Christian tradition) and the design of the national school system. For almost 100 years, most schools, formally speaking, are so called Christian schools. This is not an accidental adve...

Rede in verkorte vorm uitgesproken bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar aan de universiteit Utrecht vanwege het Utrechts Universiteitsfonds op het terrein van de ‘Levensbeschouwelijke opvoeding en vorming in een multi-religieuze context’