Peter van Olst

198 Chapter 6 In its 14th meeting held on 7 February 2023, the conversational community spent some time looking back at its previous meetings, with the aim being to summarise what it had done so far and identify the main topics discussed up to that point. The reason for doing this was to verify if there were any topics that needed more attention regarding the broad and holistic citizenship formation of Christian trainee teachers in a modern, fragmented society and DCU’s curriculum. The three main topics the conversational community identified in that meeting were as follows: subjectifying education, epistemological formation and attitude formation (see Chapter 4.5). These topics were not only helpful for the conceptual coding process—and thus the analysis of the minutes and transcripts—but also provided the structure of the three chapters used to present this analysis. Each of Chapters 6, 7 and 8 will focus on one of the topics, explain how it emerged in the deliberations and analyse what role it played within the TAR. This chapter will focus on subjectifying education. The central question that the conversational community perceived in relation to this was formulated as follows: ‘What ability should broadly, (w)holistically formed students develop with regard to the personhood and citizenship formation of children?’ The first part of this chapter (Section 1) describes how this question emerged from the outset of the conversational community’s activities and the discussion of the exploratory research that was presented in the previous chapter. This section also identifies what subjectifying education should mean in the formation process of Christian trainee teachers. Section 2 provides a more broad analysis of how the four voices of theology came together during discussions on subjectifying education. Section 3 presents the elaborations made by the conversational community for the DCU curriculum, briefly explaining how they were embedded in the ongoing process of curriculum renewal. The final conclusion identifies the takeaways concerning the intended practice-theory for Christian citizenship formation (1). 6.1 THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP FORMATION From the constant back-and-forth movement between theory and practice, particularly from the theoretical chapters (Chapters 1–3) and the exploratory research (Chapter 5), arose some early conceptions that influenced the start of the conversational community. Citizenship formation is not something a 1 All of the quotations from the minutes and transcripts of the conversational community used from this point onwards have been translated into English by me.

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