205 Subjectifying Education and the Art of Living Together 6 to be whole persons—true to themselves and their upbringing—in the world, able to flourish in connection to its diversity and complexity. 6.1.2 Eye-opening experiences During the autumn of 2021, due to the COVID-19 restrictions, it was impossible for senior DCU students to travel abroad as planned for the usual internationalisation tracks. The conversational community took advantage of the alternative tracks that had to be rapidly prepared. The participants were happy to see that no less than 40 students were interested in studying the reality of Christian teaching at multi-ethnic urban schools in the Netherlands. However, the initial idea of inviting 20 students to spend the night in the big city (at school 1) and 20 in the other urban region (at school 2) had to be cancelled due to changing COVID-19 restrictions. In the end, the two school directors, in December 2021, gave a joint presentation at DCU. The day after, 10 students visited school 1 for the whole day, while other students investigated in small groups the reality and complexity of urban multi-ethnicity via screening websites, watching a documentary called Klassen about the opportunity gap (Sylbing et al., 2020), playing a game designed to prompt empathy with the opportunity gap called IQ110 (Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 2020) and visiting multi-ethnic neighbourhoods in two of the biggest cities in the Netherlands. In its fifth meeting, the conversational community formulated four questions for the students to reflect on after their different forms of acquaintance with multi-ethnic teaching: • What did you learn from the encounters you had? • What did those encounters do to you personally? • What would you need in your teacher training to afterwards work in such an environment? • What did you learn about the articulation of a Christian vision and the adoption of a Christian life and attitude in this environment? After completing their respective tasks, all of the students came together at DCU to fill out their evaluation forms, share experiences in small, mixed groups and reflect on what they had learned. Before the conversational community’s seventh meeting, each member studied the evaluation forms filled out by the students. During the meeting, the insider and outsider groups reviewed the students’ reflections separately so that they could share their conclusions afterwards. The outsider group responded positively to both the encounters with the students and the students’ evaluations. ‘What a quality those girls possess’, one of the coordinators of the program at school 1 exclaimed. At the
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