Understanding ‘spiritual thinking’: An exploration

Christopher Tay, Headteacher, Longden CE Primary School and Nursery, Shropshire, UK; Visiting Lecturer in ITE, University of Chester, UK This article is based on a two-year inquiry into children’s spiritual thinking in a rural Anglican primary school. Funding from the Farmington Institute supported the development of a conceptual framework for spirituality that provides children with a common language with which to explore their own spirituality and offers a starting point for a pedagogy of spiritual development. The inquiry was motivated by concerns over the crisis in mental health among older children and young people, and was premised on the hypothesis that an earlier understanding of spirituality as the exploration of personal sources of meaning, value and purpose may lead to later ability to draw on such understanding when negotiating the transition to early adulthood. Confusion over the nature of spiritual education and development is well documented. This lack of common gr