Making young children’s spirituality visible through an emergent approach

Abstract

Children’s spirituality is explicitly referred to in the Maltese National Curriculum Framework (NCF) (Ministry for Education and Employment, 2012) and in international documents, including those published by the United Nations of Children’s Funds, (UNICEF, 2015, 2021). Spirituality is also a key element in educational approaches, such as, Montessori’s and Steiner’s educational philosophies. However, understanding children’s spirituality and its application in education is restricted due to the seeming scarcity of studies, which delve into this phenomenon. Moreover, the term spirituality is the least understood of the other developmental domains, even though the field of children’s spirituality has developed considerably in the past years. Although there is no one clear definition of spirituality this study will understand spirituality as a transformative journey out of which one derives meaning, value, and purpose in life. This study thus set out to answer, ‘How can educators nurture children’s spirituality through an Emergent approach?’. It utilised a semi-systematic literature review approach of early childhood spirituality in order to obtain a better understanding of children’s spirituality. Three semi-systematic literature reviews were conducted. The first one identified characteristics of children’s spirituality, whose aim was to help educators identify these characteristics, and thus, understand better the nature of children’s spirituality. The second search identified four educational approaches, which promote the importance of the spiritual domain. The last search focused on the Emergent Curriculum. The study looked at how the principles, philosophies, pedagogies, and practices of the Emergent Curriculum can nurture the characteristics of children’s spirituality identified in the first search.