Nurturing children's spirituality during early childhood

Abstract

Throughout this dissertation, we explored ways of how to cultivate children’s innate spirituality in the early year’s classroom. Our intention was to respect and give importance to the children’s right to develop spiritually with reference to the United Nations (1989) whilst respecting their beliefs, culture and values. In this regard, we have also looked into provisions which give importance to nurturing spirituality from a young age. Moreover, while the National Curriculum Framework (2012) states that for children to develop their full potential as lifelong learners, children must be given the opportunities to “value, appreciate, perceive, and interpret the world they live in” and yet it is seen that the role of spirituality is not given the acknowledgement it deserves, especially in Maltese classrooms. It also seems that while giving importance to the religious dimension of the child’s education there seems to be a lacuna in the nurturing of children’s spirituality. Through this bibliographical research methodology, we intended to show the differences and overlaps between religion and spirituality and that is possible to nurture the spiritual without focusing on the religion dimension while keeping in mind the rich literature on the salient characteristics of early childhoods spirituality. This led us to explore and report how the early childhood educator may promote spiritual development of all children during the early years through different techniques such as Storytelling, Mindfulness, Everyday Spirituality and Nature.