202 Chapter 6 Reformed Christian circles. Despite agreeing with all of this, the second—and more hesitant—DCU student insisted that he would like to be very careful with terms such as ‘cracking open the Reformed bubble’. The first task of DCU, as he saw it, was to prepare trainee teachers for Reformed Christian schools. Members of the outsider group agreed with him on the differences between urban and rural diversity, conceding that the former, as part of their daily reality, was much more complicated. They added, however, that it would be good for all DCU students to get to know the reality of urban diversity because teachers in all circumstances have to prepare children for the whole of society, which includes this urban reality of high diversity and complexity. At the end of the meeting, this discussion led to a joint threefold conclusion that was partly based on formulations from the outsider group but approved by all of the participants: • We note that modifications to the DCU curriculum need not be aimed at cracking open the Reformed bubble; rather, what is needed is for students to have foreign and, therefore, formative experiences outside of their own context. The reason for this is to introduce students to, and teach, respectful interaction with others. It is also good to make students sensitive to specific problems of society that, according to the baseline survey, they certainly do not encounter on a daily basis, such as adversity and multi-ethnicity. • It is also important to carefully include critical students in this. • The goal is not to open up Reformed education, to choose a different orientation or to change the constituency or target group of DCU; rather, it is to connect the Reformed Christian education with the reality of pluriform society as it applies in the Netherlands. The responsibility both towards government and society (citizenship task) and towards students makes this necessary. This conclusion elaborated on what had been discussed in the conversational community’s second warm-up meeting. The Reformed social bubble was mentioned in this meeting no less than 12 times, by participants from both the insider and outsider groups. The joint conviction this meeting led to was that real acquaintance on the part of DCU students with urban diversity is necessary and cannot remain purely cognitive. Good cognitive preparation in the form of obtaining knowledge about ethnic, cultural and religious diversity is absolutely necessary—and, as one member of the outsider group observed, precedes other types of acquaintance—although real encounters outside the student’s social comfort zone are much more formative and helpful when it
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