163 The Methodology of Theological Action Research 4 theology of disclosure, relating God’s revelation to new cultural contexts and circumstances. This is another reason to conclude that TAR is especially useful to this study. 4.2 TAR APPLICATION FOR DCU TAR has been employed in England for research in dioceses, homeless charities, Catholic youth retreats and developmental help organisations. It has also been applied in projects involving catechesis, evangelisation and Alpha courses. This study focuses on DCU as a Reformed Christian teacher training institute in the Netherlands and on the process of curriculum renewal it went through during the research period. To prepare a well-integrated and ongoing learning approach for (world) citizenship education for this new curriculum, TAR was chosen as the methodology. Therefore, a TAR community was created, which involved representatives of DCU and two (later three) partner primary schools. Together, they formed a conversational community (see Section 4 of the Introduction) with an insider and an outsider team to bring all the theological voices to one table—that is, to ultimately feed DCU’s teacher training in general and citizenship formation in particular. The conversational community met a total of 20 times during the period 2021–2024. A question was raised regarding which of the teams comprising the conversational community could most accurately be referred to as the insider team. The insider team in TAR normally owns the practice; however, in this case, two different kinds of practices could be distinguished. On the one hand, there was the practice of the teacher training, a practice owned by DCU. A crucial problem with regard to this practice was that it took place in a socially very homogeneous and traditional context lacking experience of society’s highly increased levels of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. On the other hand, there was the practice of the representatives of the two—and later three— primary schools that were selected because they already had a long history of a Christian school identity with very open admission policies, resulting in a highly diverse population of children and families being connected to their schools. This practice was deliberately sought as a theological experience and practice to enrich DCU’s curriculum and its citizenship formation for a fragmented society. As, in the end, the practice of teacher training was chosen in the start-up meetings by all of the participants as the practice subject to action research, the decision was made to refer to the DCU team as the insider team. As a result, it was clear that the project would be insider led. The main researcher worked at DCU and was assigned the task of integrating an ongoing learning approach to
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