248 Chapter 7 7.3 CONCRETE ELABORATIONS FOR DCU’S CURRICULUM For DCU’s process of curriculum renewal, the conversational community indicated a number of targets to ensure that trainee teachers can sustainably combine critical faithfulness with critical openness. One existing curricular element that the conversational community showed itself to be enthusiastic about was students’ first-year assignment to interview a person with a fundamentally different political or religious view on life. It advised keeping this interview in the curriculum; however, it also advised specifying the assignment and relating it to both personhood development and the ongoing line of learning concerning world citizenship formation. A clear observation from the outsider group played a role in this decision in the 14th meeting: ‘P1 notes that (…) not too much can be expected of students who have only just completed their secondary education’. In line with the decision to start the integrated line of learning for citizenship formation by focussing on teaching students how to handle diversity in their own Christian social circle, the interview assignment was specifically directed towards Christians who hold fundamentally different views than one’s own. One of the main goals of this interview was said to be ‘not that students change their minds, but rather that they learn to open up to the motives of others’. What the conversational community wanted from as early as its start-up meetings was for students to realise that, amid cultural and religious diversity, it is important to sharply distinguish between listening to others’ perspectives and adopting those perspectives. Listening carefully and being interested are both elements that belong to the loving attitude the Bible calls for, although they do not mean that other views are adopted. Sincere listening shapes a safe space for putting forward one’s own deepest life convictions. Practicing sincere listening without early judgement involves a skillset derived from a formed attitude that, in several meetings, the conversational community identified as necessary for teacher training, as evidenced by the following quotations: • In meeting 2, a member of the outsider group asked for attention to be paid to the pedagogical side of such a skillset and attitude: Because if we start judging, your faith is not good, yes, then children will also judge each other for that. Whereas if we say, look, everyone can be as they are, then children are more likely to adopt that. • In meeting 5, a member of the outsider group indicated how really meeting people from other cultural and religious backgrounds leads to more care being paid to non-judging: But it’s always different when you look at it from
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