227 Relational Epistemology and the Art of Living Together 7 liberal) were already on the decrease, Reformed Christians still invested time and energy in their own churches, organisations, newspaper and schools. The newspaper (Reformatorisch Dagblad) and the Reformed secondary schools were founded in the 1970s. Two decades into the twenty-first century, they are still relatively strong, with the newspaper broadening its scope as a media concern and the schools still employing closed admission policies, although there is a clear sense of pressure (Janse, 2015). DCU’s student population is tightly connected to this so-called ‘refo-pillar’. Within this pillarised context, as indicated in Chapter 5.1, there is a strong focus and reliance on socialisation, not on subjectification. The conversational community was already aware of this, although it discovered, little by little, more about its consequences for the way in which DCU students tend to deal with absolute truth. In general, students seem to strongly believe in the existence and knowability of absolute truth, and they see their own context as privileged by the presence of it—in sharp and growing contrast to the secularising world outside of their social pillar. This tendency has consequences for both critical faithfulness and critical openness. Where openness is often considered a risk, faithfulness seems to be viewed as the criterion to hold on to. When the conversational community opted to consider both as crucial for the Christian citizenship formation of trainee teachers for a fragmented society, it had to face the problem that doing so, given the social background of many DCU students, was not the obvious choice; rather, it was a risky one. In the case of DCU students, it could be said that conflicting allegiances seem to play a role. On the one hand, they want to be faithful and, subsequently, consider openness a risk. On the other hand, they feel the need to prepare children for (citizenship in) today’s world and society, which entails a certain degree of openness to both diversity and complexity. The conversational community studied these conflicting allegiances (Section 1.1 will present the results regarding faithfulness, while Section 1.2 those concerning openness) and invited 10 students to a special meeting to discuss the topic and search for a way to practice the two at the same time, both as persons and as teachers (Section 1.3). 7.1.1 Loyalty to God, parents and social background Although faithfulness and openness appeared almost spontaneously during the conversational community’s meetings, both concepts can be found in the literature. Critical faithfulness is a concept elaborated by Swinton and Mowat (2006) and applied to the TAR methodology by Cameron and Duce (2013). Critical openness is employed in an older publication by Thiessen (1993), who resists the Enlightenment charge towards religious education that it indoctrinates
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw