164 Chapter 4 (world) citizenship formation into the new curriculum. In this task, I was assisted by two more DCU teacher trainers, both from the pedagogical department, and an associate member of DCU’s Research Centre. Together, we formed the insider team with—at a distance—the help of another conversational community of DCU teacher trainers and other DCU teams busy with curriculum renewal, such as the Team Internationalisation of the Pedagogical Academy (TIP). In addition, again at a distance, help and critical reflection were provided by the overarching research consortium led by the NIVOZ Foundation, which included representatives of four teacher training institutes, including DCU, as represented by the previously mentioned pedagogues and myself as the main researcher. The members of the outsider team owned the practice of Christian education in a highly diverse context. They were able to inform DCU’s teacher training through practical wisdom regarding how to deal with this diversity, which was scarcely know at DCU. In this way, the voice of operant theology was heard at the conversational community’s table from two sides: from multicultural Christian primary education and from traditional, more homogeneous teacher formation. Moreover, the voice of espoused theology came from the practitioners of highly diverse primary education and from the practitioners of homogeneous teacher training with an experienced need for better acquaintance with diversity and complexity, as will be shown in Chapter 5. All of the participants were free to bring to the table what they would like to add, to discuss, to read or to analyse. In the conversational community’s meetings, they were repeatedly invited to present their own ideas and influence the direction of the research project. As this construction guaranteed the relatively strong presence of the voices of operant and espoused theology in the conversational community, the other voices (of formal theology and, somewhat later, of normative theology) were deliberately strengthened. The voice of formal theology was brought in by the main researcher and the two participating pedagogues. This voice was constantly fed by their participation in the other conversational communities mentioned above and by the main researcher’s work on the theoretical part of this study, including the pedagogical, anthropological and philosophical insights and theories. The voice of normative theology was strengthened by the decision to begin every meeting, starting from the fourth, with a devotion from Scripture. This devotion was led by a different member of the community each time. The conversational community’s members, all of whom shared the Christian faith, were free to choose a Bible passage. The only indication they
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