One teacher’s journey towards a spiritual pedagogy – an auto ethnographical narrative of epistemological beliefs and practice

ABSTRACT

The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) for Australian presents a holistic view of early childhood education that recognises the dimensions of learning and development as being interwoven and interrelated. Spiritual development, spiritual wellbeing and spiritual identity are outlined in this document as essential components of early childhood education. However, enacting a spiritual pedagogy can be challenging for many early childhood teachers. Using an auto-ethnographical approach, this paper explores my journey as a teacher in realising my own epistemological stance, which draws on Bruner’s phenomenon of ‘self’ as a framework for understanding children’s being as it is positioned within the context of spirituality. Autoethnography allowed analysis of my lived experience, to provide an avenue for others to consider their own experiences in similar ways. The findings from this paper can support other early years educators to recognise ways that spirituality is already incorporated into their pedagogical practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• spiritual pedagogies
• being
• phenomenon of self
• identity

Introduction

Contemporary early childhood education (ECE) is framed by a policy context which suggests that educators have the responsibility to prepare children as competent contributors to a productive society. ECE is seen as a cost-effective form of human capital development (Heckman 2012; Penn 2010; UNESCO 2023) and is often justified for its potential to afford a society future economic benefit (Murray 2023). ECE is all too often viewed as a ‘means to train children for school’ (Moss 2010, 9) where there is an emphasis on ‘on competition and more formal teaching of “the basics”’ (Best 2016, 273).

In this context, the Australian Early Years Learning Framework [EYLF] (Australian Government Department of Education 2022) positions young children through a lens of not only becoming, but also being and belonging. It presents a holistic view of ECE that recognises the dimensions of learning and development as being interwoven and interrelated. Spiritual development and spiritual wellbeing are outlined in this document as essential components of ECE and the glossary defines the spiritual as: “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). Alongside the inclusion of spiritual development and wellbeing in the EYLF, the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration (Education Council 2019, 2) makes reference to the spiritual dimension of children’s lives by stating that education ‘plays a vital role in promoting the intellectual, physical, social, emotional, moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of young Australians’. Similarly, many early years curriculum documents globally now reference the nurturing of the spiritual child as an important component of early childhood education and care. For instance, the Framework for Children’s Learning for 3–7-Year-Olds in Wales (Government of Wales 2015), emphasises the importance of moral and spiritual development, where children are given opportunities to ‘ask questions about what is important in life from a personal perspective and from the perspective of others’ (17). Similarly, The New Zealand Te whāriki, he whaariki matauranga mo nga mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early Childhood Curriculum (New Zealand Ministry of Education 2017) recognises the importance of the spiritual dimension of young children as fundamental to their holistic development.

Prior to the introduction of the EYLF in 2009, spirituality as a component of early years education was largely aligned to religiosity and the meaning of words such as ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality’ were often viewed as synonymous with religion (Goodliff 2016). As a dimension of children’s lives, spirituality can be challenging for early childhood teachers to understand beyond the idea of it being a religious or faith-based phenomenon, as there is a lack of guidance and guidelines to support them to understand what this entails in the context of an early years pedagogy. This is further compounded by the scant reference to the spiritual in the EYLF, where the spiritual is only described and presented in the glossary (Australian Government Department of Education 2022) and the only guidance regarding teacher practice in nurturing children’s spirituality is an expectation that educators will ‘pay attention to children’s physical, personal, social, emotional and spiritual wellbeing and cognitive aspects of learning’ (Australian Government Department of Education 2022, 20). Rather than viewing spirituality through a faith-based lens, it is important that early years’ teachers shift their understanding of spirituality as connected to religion, to recognise spirituality as it connects with children’s being and identity. Eaude (2019) suggests that identity is about who one is and becomes, arguing that children’s identities are created slowly, re-negotiated over time shaped the cultural contexts which surround them.

As an early years teacher myself, and a teacher of pre-service teachers, I realised I needed to reflect on my own understanding of spirituality in the context of childhood and early childhood education in order to facilitate the evolving understanding of spirituality, so as to provide a lens through which other early years teachers can connect their pedagogy with an understanding of children’s spiritual identities. In order to achieve this, I engaged with autoethnography as a way to illuminate my journey of coming to understand and value spiritual pedagogies, as a way to inform, challenge and validate the practice of early years educators through a focus not just on the belonging or the becoming, but the child as being, recognising the child in the here and now, instead of focusing on the child from the perspective of a future oriented member of an economically productive society (Moss 2017). It is this journey of reflection regarding my teaching and pedagogical beliefs that led me to recognise these through a spiritual lens, which forms the basis of this paper.

Why spirituality?

‘Early childhood education is predicated on a holistic approach to children’s development’ (Adams, Bull, and Maynes 2016, 60), and spirituality is an essential component of holistic development. Spirituality supports feelings of connectedness, wholeness and completeness (Zhang 2012). Webster (2018) argues that spirituality pertains to the ‘being’ of a person and that learning to be involves acquiring skills, knowledge and values that enable individuals to flourish within a social environment, whilst Grajczonek (2011) connects spirituality with terms such as a sense of mystery, imagination, wisdom, knowing transcendence, awe and wonder. Wonder in childhood is central to children’s developing understanding of the world and is the natural inclination of the child and the basis of children’s spirituality (Hart 2006). Robinson (2022) connects wonder to the emotions of joy, love and awe. Hyde (2017) argues sspirituality from an ontological frame, suggesting that it is central to each person’s being, and includes a person’s relationship or connectedness to themselves, others and the more than human (Grajczonek 2012).

Increasingly ECE provision is being governed by a neoliberalist performative approach whereby the role ECE is positioned as an investment in the labour market of the future (Sims and Hui 2017) and a readying the child for the future as an economic actor in an economically productive society (Moss 2017) and is being driven away from this focus on the whole child through a holistic understanding of what it is to be. This focus on performativity impacts negatively on children’s worth and value when this is measured only in terms of output, or productivity, and their innate spirituality is denied (Hyde 2021). What this means for ECE is that the image of the child and sense of self is determined by the extent to which children are seen as meeting the academic expectations, ignoring a more holistic understanding of the child in the context of what it means to be. It leads to a lens through which a successful person is viewed as one who can achieve the economic goals imposed by the need to be a productive society rather than a person who is at peace with themselves and is comfortable with knowing ‘who am I’, ‘where do I fit in’ and ‘why am I here’ (Eaude 2020).

What the past decade has shown us, however, is that children are living in a world in which what it means to be human is shaped by the recent global pandemic, wars and civil conflict, poverty, malnutrition and for many, being displaced from home, family, community, limited access to adequate food, shelter and feeling safe. Their identity has been formed by the understanding of the world as they see it, shaped by the interpretations of this world through interactions with others, creating an identity in which these experiences shape self-perception (Hudson 2016). Spiritual development involves the search for identity, meaning and purpose. Sims argues that early years educators need to ensure they are laying the foundations from “which will arise citizens with a commitment to ‘the fundamental principles of justice and freedom that lie at the heart of a robust democracy’ (Giroux 2015, quoted in Sims and Hui 2017, 2) and where they can participate in and contribute to a world in which freedom, tolerance, debate and social justice is valued (Sims and Hui 2017).

Autoethnography – a mechanism for cultural understanding

The paper draws from my own autoethnographic reflections of my journey as a teacher, to make sense of how and why I enact what I frame as a spiritual pedagogy so as to share this practice with other early years teachers who face similar challenges or tensions in articulating their own practice as one which nurtures the spiritual in children. Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that provides a systematic study, analysis, and narrative description of one’s own experiences, interactions, culture, and identity (Tracy 2019). Belonging to cultural communities, autoethnographic writers recognise their personal experiences as a valuable source for societal understanding. When teachers recognise their cultural and personal experiences and become the storyteller in an autoethnographic narrative, they ‘reveal their own multifaceted intimacy of teaching [italics in original]’ where they are able to ‘review their sense of self’ (Sarling and de Carvello 2016, 39) and reflect on their teacher identities. They use these personal experiences to understand the entanglement of the personal and the social (Chang 2013).

Autoethnography draws on methodological approaches such as critical reflection, systematic introspection, and emotional recall. More than just an opportunity to share knowledge, autoethnography is a form of inquiry in itself that ‘encourages dialogue, identification with others and social justice’ (Tracy 2019, 69). In autoethnography the author does not live through these experiences solely to make them part of a published document; rather, these experiences are assembled using hindsight to look at experience through an analytical lens (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011). In writing an autoethnography, personal narratives are used as a proposition through which to understand one’s self, or an aspect of a life as it intersects with a cultural context, or to connect with others by inviting them into the author’s world and to use what they learn there to reflect on and understand their own lives (Ellis 2004, quoted in Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011, 279). Autoethnographers ‘focus their narrative on their one self’ (Doliert and Sambrook 2012). The purpose of presenting my journey towards understanding the spiritual child, and my role and practice in supporting young children to connect with their spiritual selves, is not just to share my reflections relating to my personal sense of self and my teacher identity, beliefs and understanding, but to provide a space for other early childhood teachers to connect with their own beliefs and identify opportunities. Thus, through articulating my own personal journey it becomes research into pedagogical practice as “biography and history are joined (Bullough and Pinnegar 2001, 15).

Nurturing a sense of self-fostering children’s spirituality

The story of my journey draws on Bruner’s phenomenon of ‘self’ as a framework for understanding children’s being as it is positioned within the context of spirituality. For Bruner, self-making is the human’s principle means for establishing our uniqueness. It involves a commitment to others as well as being ‘true to oneself’ (Bruner 2004, 11). Bruner goes on to argue that ‘selfhood without such commitment constitutes a form of sociopathy, the absence of a sense of responsibility to the requirements of social being’ (11). His ontological stance is that self is a way of “framing one’s consciousness, one’s position, one’s identity, one’s commitment with respect to another (Bruner 1990, 101). He also argued that education plays a crucial role in the formation of self. As an early childhood teacher, I began my teaching career recognising the connection between young children’s sense of their social and emotional selves and their capacity to learn. At this time early childhood education in Australia was framed by a model of teaching that focused on supporting children’s development across the developmental domains (i.e., physical, social, emotional, language, cognitive development). Notions of self and identity were not part of the ‘language’ of teaching, and spiritual development was the domain of religious education, usually undertaken in faith-based educational settings. However, in working with these very young children what soon became apparent to me was that when children came to their learning without being able to connect with their sense of self, or understanding their self in relation to others, that other areas of development such as language, cognition and physicality were impacted.

My journey as an early childhood educator began around forty years ago, as a preschool teacher in Melbourne, Australia. I was working in a community in which there was a mix of affluence. Many professionals were moving into the neighbourhood due to its close proximity to the city leading to the gentrification of a previously working-class low-income area. However, there were still large pockets of disadvantage with a large public housing estate from which many of the children attending this ECE setting lived. Many of the children living on this public housing estate were in single parent families, where often they had fled domestic violence, or one parent was incarcerated, absent or had never been present. Additionally, many of the families living on this estate were refugees, relocating from war or civil unrest. Other families experienced extreme socio-economic disadvantage, and whilst many of the parents and caregivers had completed secondary school, others had low levels of schooling and/or no skills training. Many of the children were experiencing trauma due to their lived experiences, and research has shown that experiencing trauma can have long term adverse effects on young children’s emotional and physiological development (De Young, Kenardy, and Cobham 2011). Given the contexts of these children’s lives, as a teacher I felt it of most importance to focus on the emotional development of these children, to instil in these children as sense of being that was removed from the trauma of their lives. Eaude (2019) argues that spiritual development involves the search for identity, meaning and purpose, and for these children their lived experiences thus far had not supported them in this search. I realised that I had a role in supporting these children to re-shape and re-create their personal identities by focusing on relational connectedness, starting with who they were and working towards developing their own understanding of who they want to be. As such, I focused on creating and modelling the relationships and connections that enabled them to trust, love and make connections with their own self and the selves of others; to create an environment whereby their sense of self was enabled through experiencing trusting nurturing relationships to enable them to be capable of exhibiting love, compassion, and wisdom (Wilber 2006, quoted in Mata-McMahon, Haslip, and Schein 2019, 2234).

Connecting with children through a spiritual pedagogy

Whilst spirituality was not the language of ECE at the time, my planning for children’s individual development in areas such as emotional, creative and social domains were the key focus of my teaching. I recognised that for these young children, it was more important to focus on their sense of self and to support them to build connections with their own being rather than focus on more academic learning such as early literacy and learning. van (1990) discusses pedagogy as understanding the inner life of a child, knowing how they experience things, how they look at the world, how they act and most importantly how each child is a unique person. He presents pedagogy as an intensely experienced relation between the adult and the child and believes that pedagogy is experienced. For me, this understanding of pedagogy connects with the spiritual and seeing the child within. A spiritual pedagogy is one in which the focus is on nurturing the inner child, where the child is recognised and valued for the person they are, and not measured against future success. I wanted the children to experience a sense of connectedness and relationality with themselves and with others. Connecting with the language of today regarding what it means to enact a spiritual pedagogy, led to an epiphany of understanding that my pedagogy had always been framed by a spiritual pedagogy; as Bone (2008, 274) suggests – the spiritual can emerge through everyday pedagogical practice.

Children’s spirituality is the ‘life force’ that propels learning (Mata-McMahon, Haslip, and Schein 2019). Without articulating it, I understood that if children do not have a strong sense of the spiritual, then learning is always going to be challenged. It was evident to me that by nurturing their spiritual selves, they would be able to form an identity that was more than that of their lived pasts. Macintyre (1999, quoted in Eaude 2009, 189), writes that ‘the story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity’. For the children, I worked with, they very much came with an identity of themselves which had been shaped by their previous lived experiences, derived from the communities that they had been a part of. I recognised that once the children could connect with an identity of being one who is loved, cared for, and valued, they would then be able to strive for the dimensions of ‘truth, goodness, beauty, justice, and peace’ (Halinan 2018, 81). They would then be able to take up their responsibility for the requirements of being human and develop an emotional connection with those around them, an ethical understanding of connecting with others and a commitment to the betterment of self, others, and humanity through compassionate and empathetic understanding. Through reflecting on my past practices I began to develop an understanding that my own pedagogy had always been a spiritual pedagogy, as my practice whilst not using the word spiritual had always been about nurturing the spiritual child.

Building capacity for a spiritual pedagogy - a spiritual ontology

My journey as a teacher eventually took me from working directly with young children to working with the future teachers of young children. It was at this time that I began making connections between my own pedagogical beliefs and tenets regarding what constitutes learning and what learning is important, with that of a spiritual pedagogy, framed by my own ontological beliefs. Ontology is the study of being. It is concerned with the nature of existence and what it means to be (Crotty 1998, 10). As teachers, reflecting on a personal ontological belief about the nature of childhood is essential for framing a pedagogical stance. One’s thinking and understanding of the world are shaped by one’s ontological positionality, and this is constructed by the lived experiences, beliefs and cultural understandings that have framed an understanding of what it means to be.

About a decade ago I began teaching at the Australian Catholic University where it was an expectation that all units in their Initial Teacher Education (ITE) Courses included spirituality as a dimension of the content. This was a publicly funded university, and large numbers of the students were not religious. We were educating students who were not always a member of the Catholic church, were not of a Christian faith, nor necessarily going to be teaching in catholic schools or early childhood settings. This mandated need to include spirituality in teaching content created a conundrum, whereby I needed to explore more secular dimensions of spirituality to engage with the students, the expectations of the University and also the focus of a broadly secular early childhood sector. It was at this time I began the next chapter of my journey where I began to recognise and examine what I now see is a spiritual pedagogy. It was here that I began to recognise and understand spirituality from a more secular standpoint – connecting this with human qualities such as love, kindness, forgiveness, generosity (Elkind 1992). I came across a booklet designed for early childhood teachers which provided an understanding of spirituality as a way of nurturing the ‘being’ child, and practical examples of how teachers can enact a spiritual pedagogy in their own teaching (Thomas and Lockwood 2009). It was in reading this text that I began to make connections with the key spiritual dimensions in the pedagogical approaches I had always drawn upon in my work with young children, focusing on the holistic child rather than the academic child, instilling a strong sense of identity, of being, of empathy, trust and love, and cultivating compassion in young children for others, and for the world in which they are living.

My journey towards an understanding my practice as a spiritual pedagogy, was further illuminated through an understanding this has always been shaped by an ontological understanding that ‘being’ is underscored by connectedness and relationality (Adams, Hyde, and Woolley 2008). Noddings (2013) suggests humans are naturally in relation with others and our very individuality is defined within this set of relations. As human beings we are all interconnected, interdependent relational beings (London 2016; Noddings 2013; Zhang and Wu 2016). Additionally, I began to draw on an ontological understanding of being as identity. I saw strong synergies between this ontology and Bruner’s, 2004 sense of self; that the spiritual dimensions of what it means to be are embedded with knowing who I am and where I fit in relation to self and others. Through reflection on these ontological understandings I was able to reaffirm the importance of provoking young children to explore what it means to be human in the context of self and others.

Storying a spiritual pedagogy – implications for early childhood teachers

The storying of my journey as a spiritual educator through this autoethnographic approach provided an opportunity for me to explore and reflect upon my own experiences, interactions, culture, and identity as a spiritual pedagogue. van (1990) argues that the connection of research to pedagogy can sometime be tenuous. This autoethnographic narrative of my pedagogical journey is an attempt to strengthen my own connection with pedagogy, so as to support other early years teachers to act pedagogically through learning about themselves in reading this journey, and see their own practice through the lens of my personal account. As Bullnough and Pinnegar (2001, 16) suggest ‘in seeing, the reader is able to see self and other more fully’. What this process of storying my journey has enabled is an increased understanding of the way the contemporary values of ECE are shifting from the child as ‘being’ to the child as ‘becoming’, and to make sense of my practice as being in resisting this. It reaffirmed my belief of what should be important in ECE. This autoethnographic approach enabled me to use an analytical lens to not only understand myself as a teacher, but also to invite others to use what they learn from reading this narrative to reflect on and understand their own lives as early years teachers. Examining my own ontological beliefs what it means to be enabled me to reinterpret my practice through a spiritual lens. How I have storied my own practice and pedagogy through the lens of a spiritual pedagogy is no different to the stories of many other early years educators for whom the importance of nurturing the holistic child through similar practices and pedagogical approaches are central to their own pedagogical beliefs.

Many children experience considerable difficulties, trauma, adversity, sadness and distress, and the past decade has made this more real to children. They experience this daily through digital media, personal lived experiences and interactions with others around them. However, a strong spiritual wellbeing provides a personal coping resource throughout a person’s life (Zhang 2012), connecting with feelings of happiness and emotional wellbeing (Eaude 2009). The importance of nurturing happiness in young children has always been an important focus of how I teach and why I teach. Noddings (2003) suggests that spirituality has the capacity to contribute significantly to happiness and she goes on to argue that happy children rarely become cruel. This reflective journey has enabled me to draw out the significance of these words through my emerging spiritual ontology. What it means to be spiritual is not just about the inner sense of self but is externalised through a relational connectedness built on care and happiness and based in joy and wonder. The words: ‘awe’, ‘wonder’, ‘imagination’, ‘being’ are all words that are included in the EYLF (Australian Government Department of Education 2022).

As an early years teacher I believe it is vitally important for children’s sense of self and sense of their place in this world, that they have the capacity to develop and maintain caring relations, to know not only what it means to be cared for, but also in caring for others. Noddings (2003) believes that in order to be happy children need to learn to exercise virtues that help to maintain positive relations with others. In connecting this to the spiritual, the desire to enact caring relations to both self and others is fundamental to an individual’s spiritual self. Children need to love themselves before they can love and care for others in meaningful ways. This epiphanic journey has further resonated for me the importance of nurturing young children’s joy in the everyday encounters and features of everyday life that contribute to spiritual life and internal happiness – the joy of watching the sunrise, the experience of running through the autumn leaves, the wonderment of a cradling a baby animal. As early years teachers are more and more focused on more academic learning, it is easy to lose site of the importance of experiencing wonder, being joyful and the importance of happiness in an early years’ curriculum.

When early years teachers are faced with the tensions of readying children for academic success whilst recognising the need to engage and nurture the spiritual that is the life force that propels learning (Mata-McMahon, Haslip, and Schein 2019) they will often struggle to articulate the value and purpose of what they do as a spiritual pedagogy. This can give rise to competing voices where there is both a confidence in knowing what it means to be spiritual and its importance in the lives of children, and self-doubt in relation to articulation of practice (Hyde 2021). Documents such as the EYLF (Australian Government Department of Education 2022) suggest that it is the role of early years educators to nurture the spiritual dimensions of children’s lives but in reporting on children’s learning outcomes, the spiritual self is not included as an indicator. When educators are measured against indicators of learning they will default to examples provided to make evident the success of their teaching, and in the EYLF indicators of spiritual learning are absent. In an environment shaped by performative practices of accountability and measurement, it is easy for early years educators to default to a position of ‘doing spirituality’ where a focus on nurturing the spiritual child is reduced to a set of activities and practices which can be documented or made visible, rather than focusing on what it means to be spiritual. Eaude (2022) rightly argues that it is not the engagement in the activity itself that is important, but the questioning of the response to that engagement evokes. The activities are not an end in themselves but should be seen as conduits for spiritual development or growth.

Conclusion

By sharing the story of my pedagogical journey, I hope to be able to build on the emerging dialogue regarding the role and practice of early years educators in addressing the spiritual dimension included within the EYLF (Australian Government Department of Education 2022) and other curricula frameworks, to shift the discourse of spirituality as just being associated with religion and faith-based understandings. The global early years policy context presents ambiguity for teachers tying to navigate practice. On the one hand, curricula frameworks argue for seeing the child holistically, while a contextual policy paradigm positions ECE as readying children for later academic success, and being successful is to be achieving internationally assigned benchmarks for literacy and numeracy. I hope to affirm for many teachers the belief in their own practice as nurturing the spiritual, whilst at the same time provoke and challenge others to move beyond the discourse of performativity and the schoolification of children to re-ignite a belief in the importance of the ‘being’ child. As young children continue to be exposed to a world in which they are surrounded by war, poverty, pandemics and environmental devastation, reconnecting with spirituality through a focus on awe, wonder, joy, kindness, and a sense of mystery, as fundamental to the nurturing of young children, re-balances childhood. Early years teachers have both a responsibility and an opportunity to reclaim the aim early childhood, not in relation to what children’s success looks like, but in who they are as people in a society in which humanity can flourish. Like many other curricula frameworks the EYLF, though the pillar of ‘being’ assigns permission to early years teachers to challenge the productivity agenda, where their role is viewed as developing the child of tomorrow, the child who is becoming a future citizen, whose success is measured by the extent to which they can contribute to a strong economically prosperous Australia. My hope is that this autoethnographic narrative of my own experience, challenges, and pedagogical epiphany can encourage other teachers to intentionally engage with a spiritual pedagogy in which what it means to ‘be’ is valued and nurtured, creating a more holistic measure for what children will become is central.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Rouse

Elizabeth Rouse is an Associate Professor in early childhood education at Deakin University. Her research focuses on pedagogy and practice in the early years, as well as young children’s wellbeing, and teacher relationships. She currently works in the area of initial teacher education lectures in the area of student wellbeing and teacher pedagogy.