Children’s life and spirituality development and their educations: sensing, spaces, and sources of influence

Abstract

Inspired by Fisher (2011), Hay and Nye (1998), Hyde (2008), Tirri (2009), Trousdale (2005), Willis (2012) and many other scholars cited in this editorial and beyond, three S, namely Sensing, Spaces and Sources of influences are initially proposed to inform children’s life and spirituality education. There could be at least two broad interpretations of spirituality, one associated with secular spirituality (Meehan 2002, 292) under the humanist approach that implies the search for meaning, identity, and place, and for an individual in universal human experiences (Grajczonek 2010, 5–6). In this space, spirituality is prone to be associated with connectedness, wholeness or intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships, and nature or the world but not necessarily concerned with God, Divine or an Ultimate (Grajczonek 2010, 5; Eaude 2005). At the end of the spectrum lies the spirituality linked with religious understanding within the space of faith and religious contexts. Bradford (1999, 3) advocated three facets of spirituality with a holistic approach that includes human, devotional, and practical spirituality. Practical spirituality is connected and developed, as an ongoing and cyclical process, with everyday life experiences (Bradford 1995, 8 cited in Sharpe 1997, 33). There are also scholars who make reference to Habermas’s (2001, 9) philosophy advocates spirituality as expression of postsecular religiosity and highlights individuals’ initiative to search life meaning and make sense of life themselves without answers provided by the church (Tirri 2009, 248; Ubani and Tirri 2006). There are different psychological and related perspectives on spirituality research that includes the notions of spiritual intelligence (Gardner 1983; Zohar and Marshall 2000; Tirri 2009, 246) and spiritual sensitivity (Tirri, Nokelainen, and Ubani 2006). For spiritual intelligence, there could be valuable contributions from ancient wisdom and eastern mysticism (Sisk 2016a, 183) towards an inter-connected world as well as cosmic whole, the Creator and the Creative Force (Sisk 2016b, 196). There exist many ways of strengthening spirituality for learning and enhancing spiritual intelligence such as development of a sense of community, consideration of personal goals, desires and wants and emphasis on love and compassion (Sisk 2016b, 202). Children spirituality was elucidated by Hay and Nye (1998, 119–124; cited in de Assis 2021, 13) as ‘intentional and natural process of relating to the world, to all things animate and inanimate, to others, including a Divine Other, and the self’. They propose, from the perspective of children’s spiritual sensitivity (Tirri 2009, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CHILDREN’S SPIRITUALITY 2022, VOL. 27, NO. 1, 1–9 https://doi.org/10.1080/1364436X.2022.2047280