259 Basic Attitude and the Art of Living Together 8 In short, the above quotation shows how the conversational community, from that moment onwards, focused on three concept triads: (1) subjectifying education – ability – hands; (2) epistemological formation – knowledge – head; and (3) attitude formation – character – heart. The attitude it looked for within these relations can be considered a basic attitude, basic because it underlies the practice of subjectifying education and strengthens from a deeper level the epistemological formation that the preceding chapter argued for. Moreover, it precedes the knowledge of the head and the practices of the hands. They both need to arise from a basic attitude willingly adopted by the deepest source of the individual person’s will: the heart. As a person, a trainee teacher needs to develop a deliberate standpoint in life, a fundamental predisposition that can withstand the test of the critical opposition of adversity. As Petty et al. (1997) noted, at the core of defining ‘attitude’ is the notion of evaluation, as attitudes are ‘commonly viewed as summary evaluations of objects (e.g. oneself, other people, issues, etc) along a dimension ranging from positive to negative’ (p. 611). However, this deliberate and, therefore, strong stance, if it combines the intended features of a relational epistemology (i.e. critical faithfulness and critical openness), also needs to be a humble stance. This reflects one of the main findings of Chapter 7. The basic attitude that the conversational community aimed at implies a predisposition in the trainee teacher towards positive openness with regard to society in the sense of willingness and ability to serve, which goes hand in hand with deliberate humility to respect otherness. To conclude, it can be stated that the conversational community sought a deliberate and, in that sense, strong attitude on the part of the teacher as a self that deeply wants to engage with the challenges of a modern,
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