216 Chapter 6 student, a member of the insider group and two members of the outsider group: ‘The Christian teacher also sometimes has to park the faith for a while, but you don’t have to push it away. There needs to be a golden balance’. 6.2.3 The voice of formal theology According to the conversational community, the WCD movement and its practical approach can be helpful in managing the weak powers in education. The 16th meeting involved an evaluation of WCD in light of what was already investigated and established. Participants from both the insider and outsider groups mentioned that their study of WCD helped them to focus on the child and to not be ‘stuck in systems’, ‘hold onto a basic pedagogical attitude’, ‘be related and stay in touch with yourself and the other’ and recognise the social justice perspective that belongs to WCD. At the same time, some members of the outsider group suggested that, from the Christian perspective, they found WCD to lack clarity and, therefore, initially perceived it to be ‘floaty’. Looking back, it helped them to enrich WCD with a specifically Biblical motivation and purpose or telos. Without that, they considered WCD, even after studying it more deeply, to remain too focused on just the child and his or her selfdevelopment, as the following conversation between members of the outsider group shows: P1: I like this text on WCD as it is now. Yes, of course, you explicitly miss Christianity in it, but that makes sense. But no, I don’t find it floaty anymore. P2: A little too child-centred? P3: Yes, it is very much child-centred. The child has to develop, selfdevelopment (...) Of course, we want children to flourish (...) But I also want them to come to their destiny. And what is their destiny in this world? I think that’s what you want, to give children direction for their lives in that, that they can also come to that destination. P4: Yes, beautiful. P2: If you write it down completely separate from the Christian identity like that, it becomes more purposeless. P3: Yes. But again, whatever I just said, I think every pedagogue also wants to direct something anyway. Pedagogy also means taking by the hand. To fill this gap, Wolterstorff’s (2004) concept of educating for shalom was, at a relatively early stage, brought into the conversational community’s deliberations. This concept was rapidly embraced by the conversational community because it made the connection with some core concepts of WCD, including its social justice perspective, filling it with a Christian theological ideal
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