39 Teaching and the Art of Living Together I Chapters 6, 7 and 8 present the reports and analyses of 20 TAR meetings related to DCU’s curriculum renewal, which were held between 2021 and 2024. During these meetings, the conversational community that applied TAR elaborated on the initial reception of WCD at DCU, seeking to identify the central elements of it in order to bring them into the curriculum renewal process and analyse their effects. The central themes of these chapters are topics that emerged in the discussions and conversations during the meetings, and they can count as core components for holistic Christian citizenship education: subjectifying education (Chapter 6), epistemological formation (Chapter 7) and service-oriented attitude (Chapter 8). In this way, a clear connection is made with the theoretical part of this dissertation, especially through bringing elements of formal theology into the conversational community: Wolterstorff’s (2004, 2017) shalom model, Beech’s (2019, 2021, 2022) relational epistemology and Biesta’s (2022) subjectification plea. In turn, this practical-empirical part leads to new insights, for example, the centrality of the combined dynamics of critical openness and critical faithfulness to determining the final answer to this dissertation’s central research question. It is this combination that led to the dissertation’s title, Faithfully Connected, as a wish for trainee Christian teachers in a modern, fragmented world and society. In Chapter 9, the insights concerning these three topics are brought together in a theology of disclosure: a formulation of theological insights for Christian citizenship formation in a modern, fragmented society, as it emerged within the conversational community that applied TAR. This theology was reviewed and, finally, approved by the conversational community itself. It forms the final step in the empirical part of this study, which leads immediately afterwards to a practice-theory for Christian citizenship formation in a modern, fragmented society. Chapter 10 presents the identified core components in terms of their holistic coherence and practical elaboration for DCU’s curriculum and then discusses both the methodology and the outcome of this study. It is in this final chapter (Chapter 10) that the continuous, interrelated elements of the study—that is, the theoretical and the practical-empirical parts—are brought together and, through their interconnectedness, provide a practice-theory for Christian citizenship formation in education that is as Biblically holistic as Prideaux’ (1940) proposal some 80 years ago but also practically applicable to the context of a modern, fragmented world and society, which is characterised by high diversity and high complexity.
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