Mindfulness, meditation and me: student teachers’ willingness to engage with spiritual activities in the primary school classroom

ABSTRACT Tis research focused on the development of spiritual awareness in pupils in primary schools. Spiritual pedagogies, have been found to have beneficial effects on children’s emotional wellbeing and their ability to focus and to learn. Previous research has shown that student teachers are often unwilling to attempt such activities in their classrooms and the researchers wanted to discover whether this reluctance resulted from their students’ own religious identities. The research revealed that although there were observable differences between students of the various Christian denominations in their attitudes towards certain spiritual activities, there was no particular denomination which was unwilling to engage with any form of spirituality within the classroom. They also found that the use of experiential learning, in the form of workshops where the students engaged personally with the spiritual activities, was an effective way of increasing student teachers' confidence in the use of such activities .