Educating in and for diversity is an important topic in education in Europe. Central in our  view on the aims of schooling is the development of pupils’ to learn to participate in society in an autonomous, critical, democratic and socially responsible way, whilst respecting different ideological and religious views on life (Council of Europe 2008). In educational policy technical reading skills and reading comprehension are stressed. Reading culture with room for developing a personal ‘reader identity’ is hardly found in policy documents. To realize pedagogical quality in reading education it is important to pay attention not only to technical reading skills but also to the personal identity development of the pupils (Biesta, 2010).

The aim of this study was to gain insight into opinions on the aims of education in relation to children’s literature in  primary schools of a specific religious denomination. We selected four Dutch liberal protestant primary schools for a casestudy research. Liberal protestant schools have an open admissions policy and hence a varied pupil population with a range of ideological ideas. A third of all Dutch primary schools are Protestant, of which by far the majority are liberal Protestant.  Because of their varied population, liberal Protestant primary schools are often confronted with requests of orthodox Christian parents to safeguard their child’s moral development by withdrawing children’s books from the school or by emphasizing transactional reading (Pike 2007).

The research is interdisciplinary in character; it is founded in educational sciences and the sociology of literature. By the start of the research there was some empirical evidence that liberal Protestant primary schools in the Netherlands sometimes withhold books from pupils and that decisions about this are not always openly communicated to parents.

The research question for the whole project is:

What opinions on children’s literature are found in liberal Protestant primary schools and how are these manifested in school practice? In the presentation we want to focus on the opinions of teachers on the identity of the school in relation to education on children’s literature in their school and how these are manifested in the choice of books and in working with books. 

It is known that parents’ choice of a liberal Protestant school is not only determined by the distance between home and the school and the quality of education but also by their religious orientation. The school’s religious identity can be expressed in a formal vision but members of the school team (principal and teachers) can interpret it in an informal way (Avest, ter, Bakker, Bertram-Troost, & Miedema 2007). While the pupil population at liberal Protestant schools is very diverse, the teacher population is characterized by a shared ideological biography. Team members have been brought up Protestant and were educated in Protestant schools. They share this biography with some of the parents. Liberal Protestant schools do vary. They can focus on the narrow visible identity of the school, through religious-knowledge lessons and the celebration of Christian rituals, or give a broader interpretation to the religious identity as an integral part of the curriculum.  

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