33 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I basic conception of what Christian citizenship should look like in a context characterised by high diversity and complexity. It searches for answers to questions of how teacher training in relation to Christian citizenship education changes in this new sociocultural reality. An integrative approach is needed in this regard, as a more clear analysis of both super-diversity and supercomplexity will reveal. 4. TOWARDS A (HOLISTIC) RESEARCH DESIGN As this study searches for a holistically integrated response to the challenges that a fragmented society poses for citizenship formation, its design cannot be at odds with such a search. As argued above, the study itself should have a holistic nature to ensure an outcome that really ties together the different aspects studied within it. A holistic approach is integrative and focuses on honouring relationships and connections, with ‘strong potential for revealing complexity’ (Miles et al., 2020, pp. 8, 316). It seeks to maintain a view of larger wholes in which the sub-elements and sub-areas are closely related and interconnected. When a holistic approach takes into account a multitude of factors it is impossible to consider every single factor in depth. Notwithstanding, it is the interconnectedness of the factors and elements that is particularly revealing. This is exactly the case here, with an additional reason to opt for a holistic research design—namely, that the study concerns broad educational practice. Educational research should be developed in such a way as to take the reality of educational practices as the starting point and apply a research methodology that respects the reality and complexity of the research theme in practice, which brings forth understandings that are perceived as meaningful (Martens et al., 2020). This means that they potentially contribute to the ‘soft emancipation of educational actors by providing them with more and better opportunities for their own judgement, decision making, and action’ (Biesta, 2020, p. 22). This study forms part of a broader movement initiated a few decades ago in the sociology field by the above-mentioned sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. In his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu (1977) argued for including the wisdom of practitioners in scientific research. The term practice-theory comes from his proposal, which centres on key themes such as the structure, agency, habitus and epistemology of the social sciences (Maggio, 2017). Criticising structuralists, on the one hand, and existentialists (including phenomenologists and ethnomethodologists), on the other, Bourdieu (1977) stated that social
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