309 Conclusion and Discussion 10 • Connect intercultural and international experiences to their personhood formation This elaboration belongs to all three core components—attitude formation, epistemological formation and subjectifying education. Each year of DCU’s teacher training already had its own working week, in which students go to other locations than the university and learn from society. These working weeks previously existed rather separately from each other. In the new curriculum, they are tied to both personhood formation and citizenship formation, and they are connected thematically to the shalom line. The personal reflections that students were already experiencing in the past concerning their international experiences in the third or (mainly) fourth year are now thematically connected to the shalom line as well. In this way, students learn to interpret their highly formative experiences from the perspective of shalom, of social justice and of both faithfulness and openness. These elements of DCU’s new curriculum proceed directly or indirectly from this study. Other, smaller elements were included with them, as a close reading of 6.3, 7.3 and 8.3 shows. Notwithstanding, these six can be considered the main elements of the application of the above-mentioned practice-theory in DCU’s curriculum. Together with the practice-theory itself, this creates a body of knowledge for DCU and, at the same time, for other, faith-based teacher training institutes that want to relate their curricula and formational practices to the sociocultural reality of fragmentation. At DCU, where the preparative and early real-life experiences were positive, this body of knowledge needs further testing and fine-tuning between the intended and the realised curriculum. To serve the wider educational ecosystem, a synthesis between this particular body of knowledge—in the form of a practice-theory with concrete curricular elaborations—and other bodies of knowledge on broad citizenship and personhood formation is recommended. 10.3 DISCUSSION OF THE METHODOLOGY USED Two fundamental decisions were made with regard to the method used for this study. In the first place, the choice was made of an approach that was in and of itself holistic. This led to a research design along the lines of a lemniscate, which provided for a constant back-and-forth-movement between vision, intentions, design and practice. Based on this choice, the first three chapters offer the results of a deep theoretical analysis of the challenge of fragmentation and the need for a Biblically holistic response in citizenship education. Chapters 5–9 present the results of empirical action research for
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