Peter van Olst

273 Basic Attitude and the Art of Living Together 8 even more than is reasonable, this inner drive provides motivation and thus needs practicing. It can be practised in one’s own classroom, which is called by the insider group—as in the introduction to this dissertation—a mini-society. In addition to what the outsider group formulated, the statement of the insider group advocates for investing in students’ offline time, without the impulses stemming from digital technology, for example, smartphones, to stimulate relational longing in trainee teachers. Conclusion The conversational community, thinking through the four basic attitudes presented by Wells (2015) and the pedagogy of longing suggested by van Dijk (2015), recognised the need for Christian trainee teachers to learn to live in a relationship with others as part of how God asks people to live. For this reason, they need to learn during their teacher training to participate in small communities in which they, in a sphere of trust and perhaps even vulnerability, help each other to proceed and which help them to take the steps necessary to be exposed to higher levels of diversity. These higher levels of diversity can be confusing and maybe even threatening, but that is where the topic of longing is brought into the picture. Longing proceeds from the shalom belief that what originally belongs together needs to be healed, and it stimulates a process of subjectification. The conversational community perceived the Christian identity as a strong motivation for students to participate in the world and sought to stimulate in them the longing associated with heavenly citizenship—of loving God above all and others like themselves. 8.2.3 The voice of operant theology It is especially difficult to separate the voices of operant and espoused theology from the voice of formal theology with regard to the topic of basic attitude. Section 8.2.2, which focused on the voice of formal theology, presented the reflections of the conversational community’s members on the input from formal theology—taken as broadly as announced in the methodological Chapter 4—including their own practice, ideas and examples. The specific meetings that, in that context, were analysed—the 11th and the 15th—do not contain any codes that directly link the text of the minutes and transcripts to the code ‘operant theology’. Another difficulty that pertains to the voice of operant theology is that no co-occurrence was found between the codes ‘basic attitude’ and ‘operant theology’. For these reasons, this sub-section will not only be short but will also follow up on what was presented above (2.2), along the lines of the broader code family surrounding the code ‘basic attitude’

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