192 Chapter 5 formation to help trainee teachers to both learn and practice a WCD approach for children who grow up in a society with rapidly increasing levels of diversity and complexity. St2 adds one more layer to WCD and WTD: ‘And not only that. I think (…) also for the person who teaches the student’. 5.3.1 Brief summary of the exploratory student theses During her own research, St1 (9) took 14 teachers and 270 children through a questionnaire about citizenship formation. Half of them belonged to three relatively traditional, homogeneous schools, while the other half belonged to three schools with high levels of ethnic and sociocultural plurality. The results she gathered led to the conclusion that plurality in the classroom is helpful in preparing for citizenship in a pluralistic society and that the ethnically homogeneous schools pay less attention to dealing with people from a different culture and this is also reflected in the reactions of the students. Yet it is very important that the students later, when they go to study or work outside their protected bubble, can also function well in society with people from a different culture. Because in our multicultural society, everyone has to deal with this to a greater or lesser extent. St2 surveyed 13 staff members from 3 pluralistic schools and interviewed a school director who showed themself to be positive about the same conclusion. St3 surveyed 25 children and teachers and then selected 3 children and 2 teachers for in-depth interviews to reach the conclusion that ethnic and cultural diversity in primary schools in urban zones requires a broad, intercultural approach. Based on interviews with teachers from schools with high rates of plurality, St4 designed a tool to value elements of personhood formation besides the reports children receive for cognitive results. In this ‘qualities profile’, she enumerated 69 different characteristics from which teachers could pick three that they recognised as especially strong in the student. The profile also asks teachers to choose two characteristics in terms of which, according to them, students could grow more. All 69 characteristics were linked to five central areas or sources indicated by the ASCD (see Chapter 2.3.1): physical qualities, social qualities, emotional qualities, spiritual qualities and valuedriven qualities. St5 conducted a series of observations and interviews at a private international school to compare WCD with a student-centred approach 9 The student codes are random here, which means that they cannot be connected to the codes applied in the focus group interview.
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