35 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I The alignment this conversational framework strives for requires a constant back-and-forth movement among the model’s four central elements. It does so because it understands teacher education as ‘a process between two active and reflective agents: the teacher educator and the student teacher’ (Cijvat et al., 2023, p. 4). As a consequence, the process starts as a relationship between two (or more) human beings, which is intended to develop the confidence and ability to be in the world (Delors, 1996). In so doing, it creates a ‘dialogical and interactive process’ in which ‘an inquiring attitude of teacher educators as active and reflexive agents is crucial, stimulating a critical reflection on their thought, judgements and decisions and on the resulting alignment between vision, intention, design and practice within teacher education’ (Cijvat et al., 2023, p. 20). For this research, it means that insights from the theoretical chapters feed the conversations analysed in the empirical chapters, while, vice versa, the practical discussions lead to renewed theoretical study and choices. The research that will be presented in this dissertation, starting from Chapter 1, is connected to the work of three different but interrelated and connected conversational communities. As the main researcher and WCD project leader at DCU, I participated alongside two of my DCU colleagues in the overarching conversational community studying WCD under the project leadership of the NIVOZ Foundation, which I will identify in Chapter 2 as a research consortium. The same team of three participated in an internal conversational community at DCU to connect WCD to DCU’s curriculum and curriculum renewal process. The team also participated in a third conversational community, alongside representatives from three Christian primary schools who brought ample experience with ethnic, cultural and directional diversity. This conversational community—which, for this study, was by far the most important—applied theological action research (TAR) over the course of four consecutive years (2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024), which will be further described and defended in the methodological chapter of this dissertation (Chapter 4).
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