270 Chapter 8 to add to the basic attitude that students need to learn was longing/a pedagogy of longing, as talking about this topic helps to overcome for a moment the dominant focus on cognition and achievable goals. 15th meeting, on longing One member of the insider group took the initiative to provide the conversational community with an inspirational text on longing (van Dijk, 2015). Before the 15th meeting, all of the members had read the text and indicated which phrases appealed to them or raised questions. The same insider group member started the meeting with a devotion that was not directly coded as ‘basic attitude’ but held several codes from the broader code family, including ‘attention’, ‘seeing’ and ‘longing’. It is interesting to see that this devotion was also on a Bible passage on the risen Jesus (John 20: 1,2,11–18). The devotion leader showed the group a painting of Maria looking at Jesus, one part of her face expressing confusion and sadness, the other part full of joy and longing. The minutes say: ‘Looking leads here to really seeing—and that is the image P1 has of WCD. Broad-based education is about arousing desire, and art can play a big role in that’. After the devotion, the conversational community split up into the insider team and the outsider team to discuss the text and then share their findings. The summary of the findings by the outsider group shows a remarkable coherence with the motivating idea of heavenly citizenship that Chapter 1.3.2 was concerned with. It connects this heavenly citizenship to the attitude of ‘being with’. As one member of the outsider group provided a written summary, it is possible to quote the outsider group on this topic with accuracy: Contemporary society can be characterised by fragmentation (in conjunction with polarisation and individualism). Against this, the Christian perspective is characterised by a sense of community, responsibility for one another. For Christian education, this means that the emphasis is not on the individual child (the child in the eyes of many parents is a project that must succeed). Children have primarily become entrepreneurs of themselves. In the living world, it is often about ‘being yourself’. It is reinforced by having to shine on social media, the portfolios and coaches in education, the CITO score system that constantly compares children to the average child, the urge to perform better and better. The personal formation in a Christian school takes place mainly in groups. Children should know that they themselves are not the centre of the universe, but that there is Someone higher (God) and that the interests of fellow human beings count. So, being there for
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw