Peter van Olst

210 Chapter 6 from the golden weeks, are of great value. Students must be prepared for this. For themselves, student time proves essential to their own person formation. A clear danger is that the shortage of teachers leads to students being lured into jobs within education as soon as possible. This ensures that part of the student’s time is lost and personal development comes under pressure. The goal should be: ‘Training together, from the relationship’. Students want to be seen and to hear that teachers are equipped. They need to hear feedback from relationship. In group dynamics, it appears to be important for students to get to know each other well and, therefore, learn to get along better. They also highly value freedom of choice, where they are more likely to ask for guidance. What the conversational community learned from this inquiry into personhood formation in children, as well as what is required from teachers, is that, in the first place, personhood formation is something that just happens, specifically in relationships: teacher–student, student–student, student–group, teacher–group. It happens throughout the day, without teachers being able to identify exactly when and where. Therefore, personhood formation is not very measurable. These findings coincided with findings by researchers from Inholland (Elshout & Enthoven, 2022) that were presented to the conversational community. The conclusions underline the importance of the pedagogical relationship for subjectifying education. Becoming a subject has everything to do with citizenship as the art of living together. This art is practiced on a daily basis in the group and needs to be guided by the teacher in an exemplary way. In the final report stemming from the two joint meetings, the conversational community endorsed the difference that Visser-Vogel and de Muynck (2019) identified between identity formation and personhood formation. In identity formation, the core question is: ‘Who am I?’ In personhood formation, the central question is: ‘How am I?’ This distinction ties personhood formation to a broad and integrative conception of citizenship formation (intersubjectivity). Moreover, central to the formational process are questions that can only be answered in relationships: What is expected from me? How should I be? What does this situation ask of me? How am I related to God? How am I related to my neighbour? How do I relate to creation and the world in which I live? All of these questions relate to a person with a personality that is influenced by relationship, as found in Zizioulas’ (2021) conception in Chapter 1.3.1. The student becomes a person when he or she freely answers what the relationship presents him or her with. The person becomes a citizen when he or she freely responds, as a subject, to the challenges of a diverse and complex society.

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