19 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I to connect—with each other, the community, society and the world—and to flourish within those connections’ (7). The central purpose of this study is to identify core components for teacher training with regard to Christian citizenship education. To aim for more would definitely overstretch the study’s scope and possibilities. Nevertheless, a leading criterion will be that these core components must fit together holistically. If the intended outcome of citizenship education is to be holistic, the process concerning it must be likewise. To be able to prepare students for ‘the art of living together respecting fundamental differences in culture, ethnicity and basic life conceptions’ from a Christian perspective, trainee teachers should be prepared holistically. To this criterion it can be added that even the method and design of this study, given the intended outcome, should be holistic, which means that the aim is to integrate the insights and experiences of a variety of theorists and practitioners through a process of theorisation and action research. This point will be developed further towards the end of this introduction, in Section 4. The following sections of this introduction are intended to clarify the concepts already employed and to identify a research design regarding the citizenship education of trainee teachers. Section 1 delves into the challenges of both super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007) and super-complexity (Barnett, 2000) as central features of today’s world and society, with the aim being to substantiate and outline a choice for the predicate fragmented that problematises their effects on society, communities and personhood. Section 2 argues for a holistic response to this fragmentation thesis because, properly defined, fragmentation problematises a lack of cohesion. Based on that insight, Section 3 carefully phrases and explains the central research question. Section 4 then presents the case for an adequate (holistic) research design, while Section 5 provides an overview of the steps required to identify some interrelated core components in order to train (future) teachers in Christian citizenship education. The latter two sections contain an initial exploration of what is needed to bring the interrelated core components together into a practice-theory (Löfstedt & Westerlund, 2021; Rouse, 2007) for teacher training in relation to Christian citizenship education. 7 The reference to flourishing connects this study to Baarda’s (2022) study into perspectives on the theme.
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