Developing a Moral Compass: Experiences, Dialogues, and Reflections in Parochial Schools

Abstract

This qualitative study explored moral experiences from a phenomenological perspective using personal interviews and oral history narratives gathered from adult participants. The research focused on former parochial school students’ perspectives of their moral experiences as children in Catholic parochial schools of the 1950s and 1960s. Data collection utilized interviews. The purpose of the study is to seek a deep understanding and describe moral experiences, from adult perspectives, in developing virtue-oriented behavior. Participants were adult volunteers, age fifty-five to seventy-five years old, who had attended Catholic parochial schools. Emergent themes were aggregated from the personal interviews. The results of the study denote that participants’ perceptions supported literature on some of the concepts of an educative experience and other learning theories. All participants expressed that their moral experiences, whether negative or positive, were influential in the development of virtue-oriented behavior. The most common theme derived from narrative transcripts of the interviews was how participants felt their moral teachings from the nuns and priests became fundamental to their lives. An unexpected result was the feeling of thankfulness or gratitude that participants felt for their moral education and to the parents and religious teachers, though they articulated many moral challenges in their recollections.

KEYWORDS:

• moral education
• moral development
• oral history
• memory
• virtue
• Catholic schools