203 Subjectifying Education and the Art of Living Together 6 comes to learning how to be one’s self outside of the familiar social context. A member of the insider group raised the issue of what would motivate students to take steps outside of their comfort zones, as this may well feel threatening to them. A member of the outsider team responded that short but obligatory internships would open up new worlds for them that would provide intrinsic motivation: That’s why it’s just right that they have to have been here once, because then there’s just no choice for a while. Because you have to experience this. Of course, you can be prepared cognitively for this type of education, but in the end, you have to experience what it is like to walk around among these children, and like you said: wow, you just get a hug from a child in the middle of the hallway, that only happens in our kindergarten. You don’t know things like that if you haven’t been here. Another member of the outsider group observed that good motivation within the student is necessary to help him or her to take the step: ‘They really have to want to’. To this, however, she and others immediately added the following (2): P1: But sometimes you really have to put them on the spot. Who knows, they might be very happy afterwards. P2: Of course, that’s the case with a lot of things you learn. P3: Indeed, looking outside your own bubble, that just helps. But not to force. Not like: everyone should be able to work here, because that’s just not the case. The conclusion drawn from these deliberations was that initial acquaintance with higher levels of diversity should be included in the curriculum but not emphasised to such an extent as to deter students, instead opening new windows (on dealing with diversity and complexity) for them. Based on intrinsic motivation, more intense follow-up steps should be optional for students. In the conversational community, a clear difference was noted between a first, well-prepared, but not highly exigent taster internship for, for example, sophomores, and a more intense but optional internship for juniors or seniors. The caution here was motivated by the experienced tension between the two dynamics that would play an important role throughout the conversational community’s activities: faithfulness, on the one hand, and openness, on the 2 All quotations from the conversational community’s minutes and transcripts are anonymised. Here, P1 means Participant 1. In each separate quotation, the numbers are assigned anew. This means that P1 in one quotation cannot be identified automatically with P1 in other quotations, and so on.
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