Peter van Olst

170 Chapter 4 At the request of the outsider team, several students were present in the meeting when the survey results were discussed. This was not the only occasion that students participated in the meetings. In the fall of 2021, five students participated in a joint discussion about adversity and socioeconomic backlogs, mainly in urban areas of the Netherlands, after having immersed themselves in the topic following a short programme designed for it. Afterwards, the conversational community decided to join forces with another DCU project—namely, a special pilot for teenager education. The reason for this was that a chapter on personhood formation needed to be written for the pilot study. In between the two meetings, which were scheduled for Spring 2022, a series of 54 short interviews with children (8–14 years old) were conducted and 11 students provided personal responses to questions about moments of personhood formation that felt significant. The results were discussed in small groups during the second of the two meetings, which involved the participation of two students, one of whom played a leading role in this joint investigation. In December 2021, for the first time, the directors of schools 1 and 2 held masterclasses at DCU, which were attended by 40 senior students. Lamentably, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not possible to host all of them at the two schools, although 20 of them observed and participated at school 1 later that week. All the other students studied aspects of education in highly diverse urban contexts and visited urban neighbourhoods. They all responded to a series of reflection questions designed by the conversational community. These responses were discussed in the meeting held in January 2022. In December 2022, 10 DCU students were invited by the conversational community to discuss topics related to epistemological issues. Another data source was formed by the graduation theses written by senior DCU students. Six of them were part of the exploratory research that will be presented in Chapter 5. They had access to both school 1 and school 2 to observe, interview and survey in the months before the conversational community officially began. There were others as well. Their findings were, from time to time, shared with the conversational community and formed part of the voices of mainly operant and espoused theology but also of formal theology. In the meantime, the insider team applied the insights and findings of the conversational community in concrete proposals for DCU’s curriculum renewal. It did so with the help of the TIP. These proposals, directed towards future citizenship formation at DCU and between DCU and the partner primary schools, were repeatedly discussed and further improved by the conversational

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