213 Subjectifying Education and the Art of Living Together 6 P3, meeting 11: A lot of Christians see their faith as a wooden ship. If you pull out a plank, the whole thing sinks. Whereas (…) it’s actually more like a clay bung. You can push a bit on the outside, but the core that you believe in, that will stand. God doesn’t just fall over or something, even if you interact with others a little more and someone says what you don’t think or something. I think that if you have that awareness, it also helps a lot to be more open towards others. P2, meeting 11: It is an eye-opener for many students that an open admissions policy does not have to diminish the Christian identity, as diversity can also strengthen that identity. Stepping outside of the safety of one’s social comfort zone can, as the conversational community learned, be considered a holistic eye-opening experience. It is, therefore, subjectifying in the sense that it appeals to the person to respond. It is a stimulating experience, as one of the participating students noted in the 11th meeting, because it shapes the need to think through one’s personal faith and to articulate and practice it towards others who do not necessarily share one’s own convictions. The conversational community underlined that these kinds of holistic experiences outside of one’s comfort zone need to be prepared and guided, for example, through the participation of students in small learning communities to exchange views and ideas with others students and with teacher trainers. The minutes of the seventh meeting state as a general conclusion ‘that these learning communities offer a good place to work together on the articulation and internalisation of the Christian faith, for example, by also taking responsibility for weekly and daily openings’. 6.2.1 The voice of operant theology The voice of operant theology stems from what people of faith actually do (Cameron & Duce, 2013) and includes their ‘faith-carrying words’ (Cameron et al., 2010, p. 19). With regard to subjectifying education, the practitioners from the outsider group were insistent that it is possible to be a faithful Christian teacher in a context of high ethnic, cultural and religious diversity. They had personally noted a tension between critical faithfulness and critical openness, but after stepping outside of their personal comfort zones, they learned that this tension could be overcome. Afterwards, as they indicated, they felt the freedom to act as faithful Christian teachers, having learned to more clearly distinguish between what is essential to their faith and what may be important but does not belong to the non-negotiable core of it. The DCU students demonstrated, through their participation in the research, some hesitance to step out from their personal and social comfort
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