215 Subjectifying Education and the Art of Living Together 6 For the Christian teacher, this means putting an accent not on the individual and his or her scores and progress but on being part of the bigger picture of living as a heavenly citizen on Earth to honour God and be a blessing for others. For a Christian pedagogy of longing, this implies a focus on the wider story to be told to induce love, attention and respect. The realisation that such things are not manufacturable led the outsider group to some theological reflections: Teachers should, therefore, be transparent about their doubts. At the same time, they also live the gospel and speak with enthusiasm and amazement about all that can be taught. The goal of education is more than conversion to God (too much emphasis on this can lead to passivity), and also more than ‘doing good things’ (too much emphasis on this can lead to activism without a vertical line upwards). The goal is to form children into the ‘image bearer of God’, thereby arriving at their destination/meaning. For Christian teacher training, it seems important to us that students engage in conversation on these themes, asking inquiring questions about systems, each other's motives, et cetera. They also need a role model figure, an engaged mentor who speaks to and knows the students. In the same meeting, the insider group underlined the function of the school as a mini-society: ‘The school is the place where the upbringing of the child in the family is reinforced. Christian education is meant to help the child to become a Christian and be a Christian’. The role of the teacher is ‘to be inspirational and to support the child to flourish’. Teachers can never be cynical; rather, they have to always be ‘longing and by that trying to make a difference’. They do not have to change the world all by themselves, but just ‘awaken in the child the longing to serve God in society, just like the child was meant to by its Creator’. In the sixth meeting, the conversational community as a whole, along with the five senior students, established a clear parallel between the education of trainee teachers and that of children: The ideal can be fully Christian; however, the way towards it should be subjectifying. This implies encouragement, not imposition. To do so, a teacher needs to really see the child in his or her uniqueness, be open-minded regarding other cultural influences and know what is happening in society. At the same time, a Christian teacher needs to ‘be himself’, ‘uphold the Bible’ and ‘uphold his or her own norms and values’. The longing to simultaneously be critically open and critically faithful coheres with the clear attention on the weak forces in education. In a context of high diversity and complexity, the Christian teacher must have learned to rely on spiritual powers, for example, the power of the Spirit. This enables him or her to act like formulated in the sixth meeting by a small subgroup of one
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