ABSTRACT

The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) for Australianpresents a holistic view of early childhood education thatrecognises the dimensions of learning and development asbeing interwoven and interrelated. Spiritual development,spiritual wellbeing and spiritual identity are outlined in thisdocument as essential components of early childhood edu-cation. However, enacting a spiritual pedagogy can be chal-lenging for many early childhood teachers. Using an auto-ethnographical approach, this paper explores my journey asa teacher in realising my own epistemological stance, whichdraws on Bruner’s phenomenon of ‘self’ as a framework forunderstanding children’s being as it is positioned within thecontext of spirituality. Autoethnography allowed analysis ofmy lived experience, to provide an avenue for others toconsider their own experiences in similar ways. The findingsfrom this paper can support other early years educators torecognise ways that spirituality is already incorporated intotheir pedagogical practices.

Introduction

Contemporary early childhood education (ECE) is framed by a policy contextwhich suggests that educators have the responsibility to prepare children ascompetent contributors to a productive society. ECE is seen as a cost-effectiveform 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 forschool’ (Moss 2010, 9) where there is an emphasis on ‘on competition and moreformal 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. Itpresents a holistic view of ECE that recognises the dimensions of learning anddevelopment as being interwoven and interrelated. Spiritual development andspiritual wellbeing are outlined in this document as essential components ofECE and the glossary defines the spiritual as: “range of human experiencesincluding a sense of awe and wonder, or peacefulness, and an exploration ofbeing and knowing (Australian Government Department of Education 2022, 68).Alongside the inclusion of spiritual development and wellbeing in the EYLF, theAlice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration (Education Council 2019, 2)makes reference to the spiritual dimension of children’s lives by stating thateducation ‘plays a vital role in promoting the intellectual, physical, social,emotional, moral, spiritual and aesthetic development and wellbeing of youngAustralians’. Similarly, many early years curriculum documents globally nowreference the nurturing of the spiritual child as an important component ofearly childhood education and care. For instance, the Framework for Children’sLearning for 3–7-Year-Olds in Wales (Government of Wales 2015), emphasises theimportance of moral and spiritual development, where children are givenopportunities to ‘ask questions about what is important in life from a personalperspective and from the perspective of others’ (17). Similarly, The New ZealandTe whāriki, he whaariki matauranga mo nga mokopuna o Aotearoa: EarlyChildhood Curriculum (New Zealand Ministry of Education 2017) recognisesthe importance of the spiritual dimension of young children as fundamentalto their holistic development.

Prior to the introduction of the EYLF in 2009, spirituality as a component ofearly years education was largely aligned to religiosity and the meaning ofwords such as ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality’ were often viewed as synonymouswith religion (Goodliff 2016). As a dimension of children’s lives, spirituality canbe challenging for early childhood teachers to understand beyond the idea of itbeing a religious or faith-based phenomenon, as there is a lack of guidance andguidelines to support them to understand what this entails in the context of anearly years pedagogy. This is further compounded by the scant reference to thespiritual in the EYLF, where the spiritual is only described and presented in theglossary (Australian Government Department of Education 2022) and the onlyguidance regarding teacher practice in nurturing children’s spirituality is anexpectation 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 view-ing spirituality through a faith-based lens, it is important that early years’teachers shift their understanding of spirituality as connected to religion, torecognise spirituality as it connects with children’s being and identity. Eaude(2019) suggests that identity is about who one is and becomes, arguing thatchildren’s identities are created slowly, re-negotiated over time shaped thecultural 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 thecontext of childhood and early childhood education in order to facilitate theevolving understanding of spirituality, so as to provide a lens through whichother early years teachers can connect their pedagogy with an understanding ofchildren’s spiritual identities. In order to achieve this, I engaged with autoeth-nography as a way to illuminate my journey of coming to understand and valuespiritual pedagogies, as a way to inform, challenge and validate the practice ofearly years educators through a focus not just on the belonging or the becom-ing, but the child as being, recognising the child in the here and now, instead offocusing on the child from the perspective of a future oriented member of aneconomically productive society (Moss 2017). It is this journey of reflectionregarding my teaching and pedagogical beliefs that led me to recognise thesethrough a spiritual lens, which forms the basis of this paper.

Why spirituality?

‘Early childhood education is predicated on a holistic approach to children’sdevelopment’ (Adams, Bull, and Maynes 2016, 60), and spirituality is an essentialcomponent of holistic development. Spirituality supports feelings of connect-edness, wholeness and completeness (Zhang 2012). Webster (2018) argues thatspirituality pertains to the ‘being’ of a person and that learning to be involvesacquiring skills, knowledge and values that enable individuals to flourish withina social environment, whilst Grajczonek (2011) connects spirituality with termssuch as a sense of mystery, imagination, wisdom, knowing transcendence, aweand wonder. Wonder in childhood is central to children’s developing under-standing of the world and is the natural inclination of the child and the basis ofchildren’s spirituality (Hart 2006). Robinson (2022) connects wonder to theemotions of joy, love and awe. Hyde (2017) argues sspirituality from an ontolo-gical frame, suggesting that it is central to each person’s being, and includesa person’s relationship or connectedness to themselves, others and the morethan human (Grajczonek 2012).

Increasingly ECE provision is being governed by a neoliberalist performativeapproach whereby the role ECE is positioned as an investment in the labourmarket of the future (Sims and Hui 2017) and a readying the child for the futureas an economic actor in an economically productive society (Moss 2017) and isbeing driven away from this focus on the whole child through a holistic under-standing of what it is to be. This focus on performativity impacts negatively onchildren’s worth and value when this is measured only in terms of output, orproductivity, and their innate spirituality is denied (Hyde 2021). What this meansfor ECE is that the image of the child and sense of self is determined by theextent 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 asone who can achieve the economic goals imposed by the need to bea productive society rather than a person who is at peace with themselvesand is comfortable with knowing ‘who am I’, ‘where do I fit in’ and ‘why amI here’ (Eaude 2020).

What the past decade has shown us, however, is that children are living ina world in which what it means to be human is shaped by the recent globalpandemic, wars and civil conflict, poverty, malnutrition and for many, beingdisplaced from home, family, community, limited access to adequate food,shelter and feeling safe. Their identity has been formed by the understandingof the world as they see it, shaped by the interpretations of this world throughinteractions with others, creating an identity in which these experiences shapeself-perception (Hudson 2016). Spiritual development involves the search foridentity, meaning and purpose. Sims argues that early years educators need toensure they are laying the foundations from “which will arise citizens witha commitment to ‘the fundamental principles of justice and freedom that lieat the heart of a robust democracy’ (Giroux 2015, quoted in Sims and Hui2017, 2) and where they can participate in and contribute to a world in whichfreedom, 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 asa teacher, to make sense of how and why I enact what I frame as a spiritualpedagogy so as to share this practice with other early years teachers who facesimilar challenges or tensions in articulating their own practice as one whichnurtures the spiritual in children. Autoethnography is an approach to researchand writing that provides a systematic study, analysis, and narrative descriptionof one’s own experiences, interactions, culture, and identity (Tracy 2019).Belonging to cultural communities, autoethnographic writers recognise theirpersonal experiences as a valuable source for societal understanding. Whenteachers recognise their cultural and personal experiences and become thestoryteller in an autoethnographic narrative, they ‘reveal their own multifacetedintimacy of teaching [italics in original]’ where they are able to ‘review theirsense of self’ (Sarling and de Carvello 2016, 39) and reflect on their teacheridentities. They use these personal experiences to understand the entangle-ment of the personal and the social (Chang 2013).

Autoethnography draws on methodological approaches such as criticalreflection, systematic introspection, and emotional recall. More than just anopportunity to share knowledge, autoethnography is a form of inquiry in itselfthat ‘encourages dialogue, identification with others and social justice’ (Tracy2019, 69). In autoethnography the author does not live through these experi-ences solely to make them part of a published document; rather, these experiences are assembled using hindsight to look at experience through ananalytical lens (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011). In writing an autoethnography,personal narratives are used as a proposition through which to understandone’s self, or an aspect of a life as it intersects with a cultural context, or toconnect with others by inviting them into the author’s world and to use whatthey learn there to reflect on and understand their own lives (Ellis 2004, quotedin Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011, 279). Autoethnographers ‘focus their narra-tive on their one self’ (Doliert and Sambrook 2012). The purpose of presentingmy journey towards understanding the spiritual child, and my role and practicein supporting young children to connect with their spiritual selves, is not just toshare my reflections relating to my personal sense of self and my teacheridentity, beliefs and understanding, but to provide a space for other earlychildhood teachers to connect with their own beliefs and identify opportunities.Thus, through articulating my own personal journey it becomes research intopedagogical practice as “biography and history are joined (Bullough andPinnegar 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 frameworkfor understanding children’s being as it is positioned within the context ofspirituality. For Bruner, self-making is the human’s principle means for establish-ing our uniqueness. It involves a commitment to others as well as being ‘true tooneself’ (Bruner 2004, 11). Bruner goes on to argue that ‘selfhood without suchcommitment constitutes a form of sociopathy, the absence of a sense ofresponsibility to the requirements of social being’ (11). His ontological stanceis that self is a way of “framing one’s consciousness, one’s position, one’sidentity, one’s commitment with respect to another (Bruner 1990, 101). Healso argued that education plays a crucial role in the formation of self. As anearly childhood teacher, I began my teaching career recognising the connectionbetween young children’s sense of their social and emotional selves and theircapacity to learn. At this time early childhood education in Australia was framedby a model of teaching that focused on supporting children’s developmentacross 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 religiouseducation, usually undertaken in faith-based educational settings. However, inworking with these very young children what soon became apparent to me wasthat when children came to their learning without being able to connect withtheir sense of self, or understanding their self in relation to others, that otherareas of development such as language, cognition and physicality wereimpacted.

My journey as an early childhood educator began around forty years ago, asa preschool teacher in Melbourne, Australia. I was working in a community inwhich there was a mix of affluence. Many professionals were moving into theneighbourhood due to its close proximity to the city leading to the gentrifica-tion of a previously working-class low-income area. However, there were stilllarge pockets of disadvantage with a large public housing estate from whichmany of the children attending this ECE setting lived. Many of the children livingon this public housing estate were in single parent families, where often theyhad fled domestic violence, or one parent was incarcerated, absent or had neverbeen present. Additionally, many of the families living on this estate wererefugees, relocating from war or civil unrest. Other families experienced extremesocio-economic disadvantage, and whilst many of the parents and caregivershad completed secondary school, others had low levels of schooling and/or noskills training. Many of the children were experiencing trauma due to their livedexperiences, and research has shown that experiencing trauma can have longterm adverse effects on young children’s emotional and physiological develop-ment (De Young, Kenardy, and Cobham 2011). Given the contexts of thesechildren’s lives, as a teacher I felt it of most importance to focus on theemotional development of these children, to instil in these children as senseof being that was removed from the trauma of their lives. Eaude (2019) arguesthat spiritual development involves the search for identity, meaning and pur-pose, and for these children their lived experiences thus far had not supportedthem 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 connect-edness, starting with who they were and working towards developing their ownunderstanding of who they want to be. As such, I focused on creating andmodelling the relationships and connections that enabled them to trust, loveand make connections with their own self and the selves of others; to create anenvironment whereby their sense of self was enabled through experiencingtrusting nurturing relationships to enable them to be capable of exhibiting love,compassion, and wisdom (Wilber 2006, quoted in Mata-McMahon, Haslip, andSchein 2019, 2234).

Connecting with children through a spiritual pedagogy

Whilst spirituality was not the language of ECE at the time, my planning forchildren’s individual development in areas such as emotional, creative and socialdomains were the key focus of my teaching. I recognised that for these youngchildren, it was more important to focus on their sense of self and to supportthem to build connections with their own being rather than focus on moreacademic learning such as early literacy and learning. van (1990) discussespedagogy as understanding the inner life of a child, knowing how they experi-ence 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 experiencedrelation between the adult and the child and believes that pedagogy is experi-enced. For me, this understanding of pedagogy connects with the spiritual andseeing the child within. A spiritual pedagogy is one in which the focus is onnurturing the inner child, where the child is recognised and valued for the personthey are, and not measured against future success. I wanted the children toexperience a sense of connectedness and relationality with themselves and withothers. Connecting with the language of today regarding what it means to enacta spiritual pedagogy, led to an epiphany of understanding that my pedagogyhad 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 donot have a strong sense of the spiritual, then learning is always going to bechallenged. It was evident to me that by nurturing their spiritual selves, theywould 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 isalways embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive myidentity’. For the children, I worked with, they very much came with an identityof themselves which had been shaped by their previous lived experiences,derived from the communities that they had been a part of. I recognised thatonce 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 thenbe able to take up their responsibility for the requirements of being human anddevelop an emotional connection with those around them, an ethical under-standing 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 understandingthat my own pedagogy had always been a spiritual pedagogy, as my practicewhilst not using the word spiritual had always been about nurturing thespiritual child.

Building capacity for a spiritual pedagogy – a spiritual ontology

My journey as a teacher eventually took me from working directly with youngchildren to working with the future teachers of young children. It was at thistime that I began making connections between my own pedagogical beliefsand 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 existenceand what it means to be (Crotty 1998, 10). As teachers, reflecting on a personalontological belief about the nature of childhood is essential for framing a pedagogical stance. One’s thinking and understanding of the world areshaped by one’s ontological positionality, and this is constructed by the livedexperiences, beliefs and cultural understandings that have framed an under-standing of what it means to be.

About a decade ago I began teaching at the Australian Catholic Universitywhere 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 publiclyfunded university, and large numbers of the students were not religious. Wewere 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 catholicschools or early childhood settings. This mandated need to include spirituality inteaching content created a conundrum, whereby I needed to explore moresecular dimensions of spirituality to engage with the students, the expectationsof the University and also the focus of a broadly secular early childhood sector. Itwas at this time I began the next chapter of my journey where I began torecognise and examine what I now see is a spiritual pedagogy. It was here thatI began to recognise and understand spirituality from a more secular standpoint –connecting this with human qualities such as love, kindness, forgiveness, gener-osity (Elkind 1992). I came across a booklet designed for early childhood teacherswhich provided an understanding of spirituality as a way of nurturing the ‘being’child, and practical examples of how teachers can enact a spiritual pedagogy intheir own teaching (Thomas and Lockwood 2009). It was in reading this text thatI began to make connections with the key spiritual dimensions in the pedago-gical approaches I had always drawn upon in my work with young children,focusing on the holistic child rather than the academic child, instilling a strongsense of identity, of being, of empathy, trust and love, and cultivating compas-sion 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, wasfurther illuminated through an understanding this has always been shaped by anontological understanding that ‘being’ is underscored by connectedness and rela-tionality (Adams, Hyde, and Woolley 2008). Noddings (2013) suggests humans arenaturally in relation with others and our very individuality is defined within this setof relations. As human beings we are all interconnected, interdependent relationalbeings (London 2016; Noddings 2013; Zhang and Wu 2016). Additionally, I began todraw on an ontological understanding of being as identity. I saw strong synergiesbetween this ontology and Bruner’s, 2004 sense of self; that the spiritual dimensionsof what it means to be are embedded with knowing who I am and where I fit inrelation to self and others. Through reflection on these ontological understandingsI was able to reaffirm the importance of provoking young children to explore what itmeans to be human in the context of self and others.

Storying a spiritual pedagogy – implications for early childhoodteachers

The storying of my journey as a spiritual educator through this autoethno-graphic approach provided an opportunity for me to explore and reflect uponmy own experiences, interactions, culture, and identity as a spiritual pedagogue.van (1990) argues that the connection of research to pedagogy can sometimebe tenuous. This autoethnographic narrative of my pedagogical journey is anattempt to strengthen my own connection with pedagogy, so as to supportother early years teachers to act pedagogically through learning about them-selves in reading this journey, and see their own practice through the lens of mypersonal account. As Bullnough and Pinnegar (2001, 16) suggest ‘in seeing, thereader is able to see self and other more fully’. What this process of storying myjourney has enabled is an increased understanding of the way the contempor-ary 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 mybelief of what should be important in ECE. This autoethnographic approachenabled 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 toreflect on and understand their own lives as early years teachers. Examining myown ontological beliefs what it means to be enabled me to reinterpret mypractice through a spiritual lens. How I have storied my own practice andpedagogy through the lens of a spiritual pedagogy is no different to the storiesof many other early years educators for whom the importance of nurturing theholistic child through similar practices and pedagogical approaches are centralto their own pedagogical beliefs.

Many children experience considerable difficulties, trauma, adversity, sadnessand distress, and the past decade has made this more real to children. Theyexperience this daily through digital media, personal lived experiences andinteractions with others around them. However, a strong spiritual wellbeingprovides 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 animportant focus of how I teach and why I teach. Noddings (2003) suggests thatspirituality has the capacity to contribute significantly to happiness and shegoes on to argue that happy children rarely become cruel. This reflectivejourney has enabled me to draw out the significance of these words throughmy emerging spiritual ontology. What it means to be spiritual is not just aboutthe inner sense of self but is externalised through a relational connectednessbuilt 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 ofself and sense of their place in this world, that they have the capacity to developand 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 happychildren need to learn to exercise virtues that help to maintain positive relationswith others. In connecting this to the spiritual, the desire to enact caringrelations 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 inmeaningful ways. This epiphanic journey has further resonated for me theimportance of nurturing young children’s joy in the everyday encounters andfeatures of everyday life that contribute to spiritual life and internal happiness –the joy of watching the sunrise, the experience of running through the autumnleaves, the wonderment of a cradling a baby animal. As early years teachers aremore and more focused on more academic learning, it is easy to lose site of theimportance of experiencing wonder, being joyful and the importance of happi-ness in an early years’ curriculum.

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

Conclusion

By sharing the story of my pedagogical journey, I hope to be able to build on theemerging dialogue regarding the role and practice of early years educators in addressing the spiritual dimension included within the EYLF (AustralianGovernment Department of Education 2022) and other curricula frameworks,to shift the discourse of spirituality as just being associated with religion andfaith-based understandings. The global early years policy context presentsambiguity for teachers tying to navigate practice. On the one hand, curriculaframeworks argue for seeing the child holistically, while a contextual policyparadigm positions ECE as readying children for later academic success, andbeing successful is to be achieving internationally assigned benchmarks forliteracy and numeracy. I hope to affirm for many teachers the belief in theirown practice as nurturing the spiritual, whilst at the same time provoke andchallenge others to move beyond the discourse of performativity and theschoolification 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 aresurrounded by war, poverty, pandemics and environmental devastation, recon-necting with spirituality through a focus on awe, wonder, joy, kindness, anda sense of mystery, as fundamental to the nurturing of young children, re-balances childhood. Early years teachers have both a responsibility and anopportunity to reclaim the aim early childhood, not in relation to what children’ssuccess looks like, but in who they are as people in a society in which humanitycan flourish. Like many other curricula frameworks the EYLF, though the pillar of‘being’ assigns permission to early years teachers to challenge the productivityagenda, where their role is viewed as developing the child of tomorrow, thechild who is becoming a future citizen, whose success is measured by the extentto which they can contribute to a strong economically prosperous Australia. Myhope is that this autoethnographic narrative of my own experience, challenges,and pedagogical epiphany can encourage other teachers to intentionallyengage with a spiritual pedagogy in which what it means to ‘be’ is valued andnurtured, creating a more holistic measure for what children will become iscentral.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

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’swellbeing, and teacher relationships. She currently works in the area of initial teachereducation lectures in the area of student wellbeing and teacher pedagogy.

ORCID

Elizabeth Rouse http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2889-5382

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