Using a ‘spiritual listening tool’ to investigate how children describe spiritual and philosophical meaning in their lives

Abstract

Developing meaningful ways of listening to children’s views has been reinforced through legislation and this has led to new approaches, such as ‘spiritual listening’, being developed. ‘Spiritual listening’ aims to listen to children’s views on philosophical concepts such as drive, destiny, happiness and purpose. The authors believe that this can support children to explore how they construct meaning in their lives and to explore connections between aspects of their behaviour or experience and their underlying belief structures. This article outlines research that formed part of a project aiming to extend the original spiritual listening research. One of the central aims was to explore children’s responses to spiritual listening questions and to consider how this information develops our understanding of children’s spiritual and philosophical beliefs. The research methods consisted of conducting semi-structured interviews, using the spiritual listening questions, with 20 participants (aged 10–11 years). The researchers used grounded theory to analyse children’s responses and explore patterns within the data. The authors found that the children responded in interesting, varied and multifarious ways, which led to further conclusions about how this approach could be used in the future.

Keywords:

• spiritual listening
• listening to children
• spirituality
• philosophy
• educational psychology

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the schools, teachers, participants and advisors who took part in this study, as well as colleagues at the University of East London and employing local authorities for their support of this research. The views expressed by the writers, however, are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect those of their employers, or the local authorities where the study took place.