Enacting a spiritual pedagogy in the early years: phenomenological reflections on thoughtfulness in practice

ABSTRACT

A focus on the spiritual dimensions of childhood has been included in many early childhood education guidelines worldwide. However, understanding the nature of children’s spirituality, and how a spiritual pedagogy can be enacted in practice is still to be understood across the sector. This paper draws on van Manen’s phenomenology of practice to explore the beliefs and practice of one Australian early childhood teacher, who, through consciously drawing from her own life worlds, has intentionally developed and enacted a pedagogy that focused on nurturing young children’s spiritual wellbeing. van Manen’s lifeworld existentials – lived space, lived body, lived time, lived other, were used as lenses through which her pedagogy has been explored. The study revealed that it is the intentionality of practice that leads to spiritual pedagogy. These findings have implications for early childhood educators who are seeking new understandings to inform their own practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• spirituality
• pedagogy
• phenomenology of practice

Introduction and context

Drawing from a wider study, the aim of this paper is to use van Manen’s (2014) phenomenology of practice to explore the beliefs and practice of one Australian early childhood teacher who, through drawing from her own life worlds, made a conscious decision to enact a pedagogy that intentionally focused on nurturing children as spiritual beings. In doing so, we address two gaps in early childhood education research. Firstly, despite the inclusion of spirituality in various early childhood policy documents and curricula, reflecting the sector’s holistic approach to children’s development (e.g. Council of Ministers of Education – Canada Early Childhood Learning and Development Working Group 2014; New Zealand Ministry of Education 2017), the inclusion of pedagogical approaches that foster and facilitate children’s spiritual learning and development are largely absent in these documents. Secondly, phenomenology as a method in early childhood research is not prevalent, and so this paper makes a unique contribution to the field in presenting inceptual and eidetic insights into this teacher’s intentional spiritual pedagogy.

Spirituality is made explicit in the Australian early years learning framework (EYLF) (Australian Government Department of Education 2022; Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations 2009) (where this study was undertaken). However, for those working in Australian ECEC settings, what children’s spiritual learning encompasses is not defined. It is almost always included alongside the words: physical, emotional, social, cognitive, linguistic, and creative to recognise the holistic nature of young children’s learning development and identity. However, discussions concerning relevant pedagogical approaches that foster and facilitate children’s spiritual learning and development are largely missing from this document. It could be argued ‘such silence, potentially, creates ambiguity which can result in the omission of the spiritual from teaching pedagogy’ (Hyde 2013).

Spirituality in early childhood

Spirituality as presented in the EYLF refers to ‘a range of human experiences including a sense of awe and wonder, or peacefulness, and an exploration of being and knowing’ (Australian Government Department of Education 2022, 68). It has been defined as ‘an aspect of humanity common to all persons throughout every stage of their life and is located in the potential of every child to relate to and make sense of questions of ultimate significance’ (Goodliff 2013, 28). Spirituality is a larger concept that deals with meaning, purpose, and direction in life (Baker 2003), as well as ‘awe’, ‘wonder’, ‘joy’, ‘happiness’ (Grajczonek 2012; Mata-McMahon, Haslip, and Schein 2019; Robinson 2019). Children’s spiritual development is influenced and shaped by an interconnection between children’s sense of self, those with whom they interact as well as the world around them. It is the everyday experiences in which children’s spirituality can be found (Cervantes and Arczynski 2015; Lees 2019). Spirituality is connected with notions of identity: what it means to be, and children’s expressions of ‘being’ (Champagne 2009).

Spirituality can be understood in terms of connectedness and relationality with self, and a search for meaning, wholeness, and purpose. Froebel (1887, quoted in Best 2016, 281) suggests it is important to educate the whole child,

to facilitate the development of its body, mind, feelings, aesthetic awareness, morality and potential for imaginative and creative activity, to encourage the (‘inner’) engagement with the (‘outer’) world through ‘self-action’, to experience what it is to know joy and sadness, to love and to be loved – to become a person as fully and as meaningfully as is possible. (Best 2016, 281)

Froebel describes this as spiritual education and is the viewpoint on spirituality in early childhood taken by the authors in this paper.

The study

This paper is drawn from a study which sought to explore early childhood teachers’ understanding and enactment of their pedagogical practice in relation to children’s spirituality. The study sought to gain insights into understandings, practices, and challenges regarding the fostering and facilitation of the spiritual in Australian early childhood programs. Three early childhood teachers agreed to take part in this exploratory project. van Manen (2014, 353) maintains that the aim of phenomenological research is to gather ‘experientially rich accounts that make possible the figuration of powerful experiential examples or anecdotes that help to make contact with life as it is lived’. Following van Manen’s views, this paper draws on such an experiential account of ‘make contact’ with an early childhood teacher’s intentionality of practice that led to the enactment of a spiritual pedagogy.

The recruitment of participants for our project

Having obtained ethics approval from our institution, advertisements were placed on the Victorian Early Childhood Professional Facebook Group page seeking potential participants interested in sharing how they recognise spirituality in children’s learning, and address this in children’s learning and wellbeing. Interested early childhood educators were asked to make direct contact with us to set up a mutually convenient interview time. Despite this professional Facebook group having over twenty thousand members, only three educators responded to the invitation and subsequently engaged in the study. The interviews were undertaken using van Manen’s (1990, 66) conversational interview method, as the purpose of the interview was to explore and gather ‘experiential narrative material that may serve as a resource for developing a richer and deeper understanding’. The questions were designed as prompts (e.g. what do you understand by the word spirituality? Why do you think that this should be an important component of an early childhood or early years programme?) to enable the sharing of understandings, practices, and challenges. The interviews took place via Zoom to ensure that the project was designed to align with COVID-19 restrictions that were current in Australia at the time of conducting the research. These were audio and video recorded so that each interview could be transcribed for the purpose of analysis. Each interview lasted for approximately 30 min. Whilst three participants participated in the study, for the purposes of this article, we focus on the interview of one participant, Kylie (pseudonym), who was interviewed by the Author 2. van Manen (2014, 249) suggests that this will provide an increasingly depthful [account] of lived meaning’. It was Kylie’s length of time working across the early years sector, the capacity to draw connections between her practices, beliefs, and lived experiences, and the particular stance she shared regarding spiritual wellness in young children that enabled her to articulate a framework for nurturing the spiritual in children that the authors felt warranted exploring in more depth.

Ethical understandings

The positioning of a research participant to share their lived experiences and explore their sense of ‘self’ requires the researchers to be sensitive and to act ethically and morally towards the participants and to be ‘sensitive to the moments of thoughtfulness’ (van Manen 2014, 68). Ethical approval was gained from Deakin University (Approval Number: HAE-20-088). Prior to the interview, Kylie read a Plain Language Statement, provided consent to participate and agreed that her data could be used to inform future academic publications. At the time of the interview transcription, a pseudonym (Kylie) was assigned to respect her privacy and anonymity, and this has been used in all publications drawing from her data. Her participation in the study was voluntary, and as she was previously unknown to both the researchers there was no power imbalance. To be thoughtful and sensitive to the nature of the data collection, Kylie was given the option to choose whether to have her camera displayed. Additionally, the recording and transcript from the interview were shared back with her to ensure that she felt that her own reflections were recognised in the transcript of the interview.

Phenomenology of practice

In order to provide insights into the lived experiences of Kylie’s own practice and understanding of children’s spiritual learning and development, we have drawn on van Manen’s (2014) notion of a phenomenology of practice. This refers to ‘the practice of phenomenological research and writing that reflects on and in practice, and prepares for practice’ and which serves to ‘strengthen an embodied ontology, epistemology, and axiology of thoughtful and tactful action’ (van Manen 2014, 15). It is a reflective process that attempts to recover and express the ways in which people experience their lives as they live them, to act practically with greater thoughtfulness and tact.

Phenomenology of practice is about ‘doing’. It connects and provides insights into the everyday practice of living (van Manen 2014). It does not pose a problem to be solved or a question to be answered, but rather concerns reflecting in a phenomenological manner on the lived meanings of everyday experiences as they were encountered, or lived through, by the participant. Speaking with educators, such as Kylie, enabled us to explore those aspects of practice that were more subtle, perhaps even enigmatic and saturated with ‘existential and transcendental meaning’ (van Manen 2014, 213) such that they may only be discerned through reflection on practice that was initially undertaken pre-reflectively.

The goal of a phenomenology of practice is to disclose the lived meanings of human experiences, and to arrive at unique and inceptual understandings that ‘bring the primal experiential meaning of a phenomenon or event to reveal itself’ (van Manen 2018, 667). Its ‘method’ consists of reflexive contemplations on the eidetic, and inceptual nuances of experience, rather than through technically derived methods of coding qualitative data. There is an acknowledgement that phenomenological inquiries ‘require the full measure and complexity of the language of prose and the poetic, the cognitive and the pathic’ (van Manen 2014, 29). In this sense, phenomenology is not a method in the scientific understanding of that word. In gaining insight into the narrative of Kylie’s lived experiences, a phenomenology of practice enabled the authors to describe the development and articulation of Kylie’s ontological and epistemological beliefs by being ‘sensitive to the concerns of professional practices in professional fields [as well as] the personal and social practices of [Kylie’s] everyday living’ (213).

Knowing Kylie

Kylie has been working in the sector for over twenty-five years, mainly in centre-based long-day ECEC in one of Australia’s large capital cities. This work involved teaching young children (birth – five years). For a time Kylie undertook consultancy and managerial roles but has recently returned to working with children, facilitating wellness programs across a number of ECEC settings. As a young adult, she took on a role as a Reiki healing practitioner. Kylie shared her understanding of her experiences and background as a way of shaping how she framed children’s wellness through a spiritual lens, suggesting that ‘there is a sense of the “I AM” Presence in the hearts of us all’.

Kylie revealed that she has come to question her beliefs and practices. Like many others, she now sees spirituality as more than just religion and faith. She believes that all people are spiritual and that this can be expressed in many different ways. Interestingly Kylie spoke of having designed and developed her own framework for supporting the holistic development of the child which she calls her ‘wellness program’, but in describing this program and how she is connecting with the children through this program, the connections to spiritual wellness are apparent. Her program includes such practices as meditation, relaxation exercises, and self-expression through movement and music.

Findings-Kylie’s lifeworld existentials

This paper presents a phenomenological study of Kylie’ lived experiences as she sought to focus on and foster the spiritual development and wellbeing of the children. van Manen (1990) argues that the life worlds of all human beings are pervaded by four fundamental existential themes, which he describes as existentials. He identifies four existentials to guide reflection in the research process: lived space (spatiality), lived body (corporeality), lived time (temporality), and lived other (relationality or communality). These four existentials are used to explore the findings from the conversation with Kylie regarding her pedagogical practice and thinking regarding the holistic nurturing of children.

Lived space

… lived space is the existential theme that refers us to the world or landscape in which human beings move and find themselves at home. (van Manen 1990, 102)

Lived space is felt space. It guides one to inquire into how space is experienced in relation to the phenomenon that is being studied. Spatiality is more difficult to describe, or put into words, since the lived experience of space is largely pre-verbal – people do not ordinarily reflect on it (van Manen 1990). In her early childhood center, Kylie is intuitively aware of the type of space that she needs to create in order that children might feel ‘at home’. She intentionally sets about creating a space that is conducive not only to movement and activity but also to stillness. The space she creates enables opportunities for self-expression and exploration through nature. She creates a space in which children feel they belong, and which nurtures, ‘how [each child] feels about themselves in their environment’. The space that Kylie creates enables ‘opportunities for children within the learning environment, as well as planned intentional times in the day where we encourage and support children by putting on some really nice, chilled music, or having times of quiet and stillness’.

But Kylie is also very aware of the felt meaning that spaces within the learning environment she has created might have for individual children – those special places that young children seem to be able to seek out for themselves and withdraw, for a time, from the presence of others. van Manen (2014) and Langeveld (1983) refer to these as ‘secret places’, noting that these do not involve the child in activities of play or mischief, but rather they are places in which ‘the child just sits there, while perhaps gazing dreamingly into the distance’ (van Manen 2014, 199). Kylie recounted an incident in which one of the children in her care – Fred – sought out such a special place. She recalled,

And one day, I watched him. He was underneath these bushes, sitting underneath the trees and the branches were going over the top of his head. He held a crystal up against the tree. I said to him, ‘Wow, Fred, I’m so curious about what you’re doing with that crystal’. And he said, ‘I’m just helping nature’.

In her wisdom, Kylie understands that such places provide pedagogically appropriate experiences for children. In doing so, she reflects the words of Langeveld (1983, 17) in that this ‘is also a good pedagogical reason to permit the child his secret place … something positive grows out of this secret place as well, something which springs from the inner spiritual life of the child’. In acknowledging the importance, and necessity of such spaces, Kylie employs a pedagogical sensitivity that expresses itself in tactfulness on her part.

From an ecological approach to perception, it’s true that these types of spaces are important because they contain particular affordances – functionally significant properties in relation to the child (Heft 1998) that result in particular action possibilities. But from a phenomenological perspective, these types of lived spaces are felt spaces. They are imbued with formative pedagogical value for the growing child. As Langeveld (1983, 13) maintains, ‘the actual experience of the secret place is always grounded in a mood of tranquillity, peacefulness: It is a place where we can feel sheltered, safe, and close to that which we are intimate and deeply familiar’. These are the types of spaces that Kylie has consciously created in her early learning centre. They are grounded in tranquillity and peacefulness … they are intimate and profoundly familiar.

Lived body

The pathic dimensions of practice are pathic precisely because they reside or resonate in the body … in our very actions. (van Manen 2014, 270)

Lived body refers to the phenomenological fact that people are always bodily in the world. The pathically tuned body knows itself and perceives the world in a feeling or emotive modality of knowing and being (van Manen 2014, 269). Much of Kylie’s practice in relation to nurturing spirituality and spiritual wellbeing emanates from modes of knowing that are inhere in her lived practice, and through actions that are sensitive to the contingencies, novelties, and expectancies of the early childhood centre in which she works. This becomes clear in her declaration that, ‘the sense of heart and self, and the residing feeling that no matter what way beliefs have been formed through our early years, there is a sense of the I AM Presence in the hearts of us all’. And, it is this inner sense of knowing that provides the impetus for Kylie in her work. It is an intuitive sense of knowing. As Kylie herself says, ‘I have an intuitive way and knowing inside myself of what creating opportunities for children to explore their spiritual selves looked like. So, opportunities for stillness, opportunities for self-expression, opportunities to express emotions and teachings about emotions are important’.

Thus, the spiritual wellness program that Kylie developed centering on stillness, self-expression, and exploration through nature, comes from the knowledge that resides in her corporeal being as the result of the past experiences and beliefs that she has formed over time. Her pedagogical practice, then, is the result of her own bodily expression and is communicated through a certain confidence in her actions, a distinctive personal style, and as practical tact. Because of this, Kylie’s spiritual wellness program had its genesis long before the emergence of the EYLF, and it is more of a coincidence that her program reflects particular elements of the EYLF in relation to the spiritual. That is, Kylie was not influenced by the EYLF in developing her program. Her pathic, intuitive sense of knowing, and her ability to put this into action in her own pedagogical practice, meant that she was a forerunner in this area long before the emergence of the EYLF. It also means that she would have attended to the spiritual dimension of children’s lives irrespective of the EYLF.

Kylie is also acutely aware of the pathos of the children in her care. She is aware that ‘belonging comes from how a child feels about themselves in their environment’. She is aware that children discover who they are through their bodily interactions with the things and people around them. Their need to feel they belong resides in their need to be seen, to be recognised, by both their peers and the educator. For Kylie, it concerns ‘an innate humanness of needing to be seen, and how important it is to be seen in whatever is going on for that individual body … it is crucial to feel like you belong when you are seen’. Therefore, in her spiritual wellness program, Kylie models what it is like to be seen and to belong. This means that she herself actively participates in the activities that have been planned for the children in her care. As she says, ‘I’m going to express myself. I’m going to get in there and be very present with the children and with what it feels like in my body to express myself’. In this way, Kylie embodies her spirituality through her pedagogical practice, and in doing so, models for the children what it is like to embody the spiritual dimension of their being.

Lived time

Whatever I encountered in my past now sticks to me as memories or as (near) forgotten experiences that somehow leave traces on my being. (van Manen 1990, 104)

Lived time is the human being’s temporal way of being in the world. For Kylie, her present – the time in which she is situated and in which she embodies spirituality as an ontological reality, expressed in the interview in her declaration that, ‘I do believe that we are all spiritual beings that have a human experience’ – emerges from her past. It is this past that has informed the way she now thinks about spirituality in her practice. In particular, her ontological reality emerges from her Catholic upbringing which led her to question her beliefs and practices as she matured and entered the early childhood profession. These are the memories and traces of past experiences that have been left on her being (van Manen 1990).

Through her engagement with the EYLF and her desire to nurture the spiritual dimension of children’s lives, Kylie moves from seeing spirituality as connected to ‘a structured religion with beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, and the cultural conditioning that comes with that’ to spirituality as the acknowledgement that there are many different rituals and ceremonies in which people participate. She now understands there are a myriad of ways people express their spirituality. Some of these might be religious, while others might be connected to wonder, awe, relationships with others, connectedness to the earth, and a sense of the sacred. Kylie connects with spirituality as she sees it positioned in the EYLF, sharing her thoughts on ‘how spirituality and education has had a reframe since the learning framework and that definition of awe and wonder’. She explores ways in which she can attend to this particular dimension of children’s lives in her practice. She uses this understanding to recognise her own shifting beliefs around spirituality, reflecting that, ‘the reframe really helped me move from a structured religion with beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, and then the cultural conditioning and ways and behaviours that came on the back of that structured religion’. Her past is a key feature of the person that she is becoming as she lives towards a future that is already taking shape (van Manen 1990).

In her practice with young children, Kylie is also aware of the temporal dimension of her work. When she spoke of including the practices of meditation and relaxation in her program, she reflected that over time the children became more adept at entering into those experiences, attending to themselves and their internal aspects for longer periods of time. In other words, she has allowed the time required to persevere with those experiences to which children may need to become accustomed. In doing so, and when engaging in those experiences, there is a sense in which phenomenological time is experienced. This is time that cannot be captured by the Chronos notion of time as ordered, measurable time, typically portrayed on the clock face, or on the digital watch. Rather, it is subjective time, or Kairos time (Hyde 2021), a time in which something significant is attained as these children learn how to attend to their inner being for extended periods.

Lived other

… the lived relation we maintain with others in the interpersonal space that we share with them. (van Manen 1990, 104)

van Manen (2014, 303) argues that the existential theme of the lived other provides ways of seeing how the ‘self and others are experienced with respect to the phenomenon that is being studied’, and how the self is experienced in relations. A phenomenon of connection is essential to the way Kylie aims to form relations as a way of nurturing children’s spiritual being. For her ‘when you look at [the children], and you don't see through your perception filter who they are and what they like and what they're good at, but you simply see the essence of that other being … ’. Her practice is shaped by her belief that at ‘at the heart of spirituality is connection, and that belonging and connection are one and the same’. A sense of belonging is important to Kylie as her own existential theme of the lived other is framed by an understanding that humans will ‘struggle in our humanness to have a sense of belonging if we are void of that connection’.

Not only does Kylie see relations as the connections that occur between humans, but her practice is framed by her sense of purpose for existence and to ‘be with the children, to help and teach and support the children to help healing, to help healing of the earth and all the humans on it’. This connects closely with van Manen’s belief that humans search in the communal and the social for a sense of purpose in life, meaningfulness, and grounds for living (van Manen 1990, 105). The relation between self and other is encompassed in a spiritual ontology in which the spiritual life is lived out at the intersection between one’s own life and that of the other (Hyde 2009).

Discussion

Examining Kylie’s practice through the lifeworld existentials has provided a deep insight into not only her pedagogical practice but the lived experiences, beliefs, and values that have shaped her intent to implement a spiritual pedagogy. Kylie intentionally engages in a pedagogy in which she focuses on the child and creates a space for the child to enact and experience the spiritual. van Manen (1990) posits that teaching involves the adult in a pedagogical relationship with children, and the teacher has a unique way of seeing children through their own lifeworlds. He argues that how and what a teacher sees ‘depends on who and how we are in the world’ (van Manen 2015, 62). Kylie’s pedagogy is informed by the way she stands in the world. She draws on her own lived experiences which have enabled her to gain an understanding of the child’s experience (e.g. where she talks about music and stillness), and this has resulted in the child being inside relations with others (van Manen 2015, 208). Her connection with a sense of her own spirituality, drawn from her lived experiences and the beliefs about healing and wellness, and her deep understanding of children’s own sense of being has led to the intentional framing of her practice within a spiritual wellness pedagogical approach to her teaching.

When Kylie relates how she supports children’s spirituality through intentionally creating opportunities for stillness or supports children’s connection to music, she interprets the child’s lived experience of the spiritual through her own sense of what it means to be spiritual. Her practices centre on stillness, self-expression, and exploration through nature, music, and the joy of just ‘being’ at the moment (Bone, Cullen, and Loveridge 2007; Mata-McMahon, Haslip, and Schein 2019; Robinson 2019).

The neo-liberalist language permeating early childhood education policy globally positions children as units of economic potential, to be developed and deployed to maximise productive economies (Roberts-Holmes and Moss 2021), and the essence of what it means to ‘be’ is in danger of being eroded. Kylie has a more spiritual view of childhood. She sees the child ‘purely’ (van Manen 2015, 63) and as a whole and complete person (Baker 2003), without being influenced by the human capital discourse of what it means to be human.

Teaching involves a pedagogical relationality between children and adults acting ‘deliberately, thoughtfully and purposefully to support children’s learning’ (Australian Government Department of Education 2022, 22). The pedagogical relationship is an intentional relation, one in which the intent of the teacher is ‘always determined in a double direction: by caring for a child as he or she is and by caring for the child for what she may become’ (van Manen 2015, 119). Kylie’s intentionality in enacting her spiritual pedagogy reflects the double direction in which van Manen writes. She is developing relationships with the children that create a space in which the children feel they belong, where they can find special places they seek out for themselves and withdraw, for a time, from the presence of others. She is as van Manen (2015, 208) writes: ‘inside relations with others’ which has led to her intentionality in purposefully nurturing the spiritual within the child.

Intentional teaching involves deliberate and purposeful actions in all aspects of the curriculum. Grieshaber et al. (2021) suggest however, that there are varied understandings of learning, which may impact on what areas of curriculum are chosen for intentional teaching, and how learning is articulated and evaluated. What learning is valued is determined in many ways by the lifeworlds of the teacher designing the curriculum. Rather than Kylie’s pedagogy being framed by a human capital view of childhood, Kylie has chosen to enact a pedagogy that draws on a curriculum of spirituality – one in which the child is recognised for who they are and where they belong (Eaude 2022). They are provided with opportunities to reflect on their own selves through the regard she shows them (van Manen 2015). Her practice in embedding a sense of awe and wonder (Mata-McMahon, Haslip, and Schein 2019), to connect children with music, nature, and the arts and foster in children a deep sense of self, peacefulness, and contentment, draws on Kylie’s own understanding of and connection with children’s spirituality. This facilitates the development of mind, body, feelings, aesthetic awareness, and the potential for imaginative and creative activity so to become a person as fully and as meaningfully as possible (Best 2016).

Stockinger (2019, 307) believes that children’s spiritual development is influenced and shaped not only by themselves but also by those with whom they interact as well as the world around them. Because of Kylie’s intentionality, it can be argued that her practice is shaped by a deliberate and purposeful spiritual pedagogy. Kylie’s pedagogical practice was not driven by any external regulatory requirement to include children’s spiritual development but was informed by her own fundamental beliefs regarding the purpose of early childhood education as educating the whole child.

There are important implications from Kylie’s narrative for the ECEC sector. Most of the pedagogical practices used by Kylie consist of activities and experiences early childhood teachers may routinely plan for the children in their care. The key feature, however, is the intentionality with which Kylie thoughtfully and purposefully plans these to nurture children’s spirituality. ECEC teachers need to be intentional about planning experiences and activities to nurture children’s spirituality. This in turn requires that the ECEC practice frameworks include suggested activities and experiences that might assist the ECEC to address the spiritual dimension of children’s being.

Conclusion

There is an expectation in many early childhood policy documents and curricula that early childhood educators have an obligation to nurture children’s spirituality alongside other areas of their learning and development. However, what a spiritual pedagogy might look like in practice is difficult for many early childhood educators to understand, and in turn enact in their work with young children (Adams, Bull, and Maynes 2016; Grajczonek 2012; Hyde and Rouse 2022). This paper sought to gain insights into the lived experiences of one early childhood teacher as she provided a pedagogical context for her understanding and practice in nurturing children’s spiritual wellbeing. Examining Kylie’s practice through the lifeworld existentials has provided insight into not only what a spiritual pedagogy might encompass, but on how past experiences and connections with one’s spiritual self shape the intentionality of a spiritual pedagogy.

Taking a phenomenological approach has provided insights for early childhood educators worldwide to consider their own practice and to connect with children’s spirituality as an important aspect of the learning developing child. Emerging from this approach was understanding the importance of what spirituality as a pedagogy means to Kylie, and how it can be seen in her practice, and more importantly why it is necessary for young children’s holistic development. It is the intentionality of her practice which is inherently shaped by her own beliefs regarding the aim of early childhood education. Her pedagogy is founded on nurturing children’s relationality and connectedness with the self and between the self and others (Adams, Hyde, and Woolley 2008). What became apparent was Kylie’s intentionality to nurture the spiritual in the children. Fostering in children an understanding of what it means to ‘be’ was key to the pedagogical approaches undertaken. Kylie as a pedagogue ‘shows a difference that makes a pedagogic difference’ (van Manen 1990, 46).

In a contemporary world where childhood is positioned by what and who children should become in the future, this paper contributes to the debate surrounding what it means to be successful, and what a successful child should look like. The insights from Kylie provide a way for educators to think about their own practice through a similar lens. Teachers are increasingly ‘measured’ by the way young children are adequately prepared to meet the academic expectations of formal schooling (Moss 2010). Seeing the importance of early childhood educators working through the lens of Kylie’s practice reaffirms that to be successful should not be measured by academic attainment but by the value placed on who children are in the world. Early childhood teachers are already doing the work described by Kylie, but this often goes unrecognised or undervalued in a contemporary ‘school readiness’ paradigm. It is by engaging deeply with Kylie’s perspective that sheds light on what an intentional pedagogy to nurture the spiritual in children might entail.

Limitations

The findings of this paper are limited as they draw only on the perspectives of one early childhood teacher, located in Australia. The authors do not suggest that Kylie is unique in the way she believes and interprets her practice, nor that her practice is in any way divergent from that of many other educators. However, the limitations also enable opportunities to explore spiritual pedagogies in early childhood through further research that draws on alternate perspectives regarding spirituality and the spiritual, particularly as this is present in Indigenous ways of knowing, and how these beliefs and practices can further influence spirituality as a focus in early childhood. Additionally, posthuman understanding of being human may also provide a lens to further explore the spiritual nature of childhood and early learning, and an opportunity arises for drawing on some of these other perspectives of spirituality to explore what as Froebel suggests should encompass spiritual education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.