Developmental Psychology and Young Children’s Religious Education sets out to identify the conceptual pre-requisites for young children’s religious education learning and clearly highlights the challenges that children and their teachers encounter in the RE educational process.
Based on a study with 431 children aged 5 to 7 years from different schools, faith and non-faith, and 47 teachers from the same schools as the children, this book offers an insightful look into younger children’s religious education, providing statistical evidence to dismantle the belief that young children lack the ability to conceptualise God in abstract terms. The information obtained from these children and their teachers reveals a major discrepancy between the teachers’ perceptions of young children’s conceptual abilities for RE learning, on the one hand, and children’s actual abilities revealed in their responses throughout the study, on the other. Based on the evidence described in the volume, Petrovich argues that teacher-training courses for primary RE need to be designed to include a substantial component of contemporary developmental research that is of direct relevance to children’s conceptual abilities and understanding of abstract concepts.
Developmental Psychology and Young Children’s Religious Education is essential reading for students and researchers in developmental psychology, religious education, teacher education, education studies and cultural anthropology.
Author(s): Olivera Petrovich
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 133
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Introduction
Psychology and RE: A history of the relationship
Contemporary developmental research and its relevance to RE
Religion, spirituality and worldviews
Notes
Chapter 2: Research design and fieldwork: Rationale and method
Chapter 3: Children's perceptions of and attitudes to school RE: Interview findings
Memory and comprehension of RE content: Stories and religious words
RE stories
Religious words
Children's statements
School assemblies: Children's likes and dislikes
Children's statements
Judgements about RE learning as easy or hard
Children's statements
Notes
Chapter 4: Everyday religious understanding: The natural-theological reasoning test
Children's ontological knowledge
Origin Task
Animacy Task
Children's cosmological reasoning
Origin of matter conjectures
God's role in the origin of matter
Note
Chapter 5: Children's concepts of God: Everyday and RE-based
Main findings: God image, Image justification and Question about God
Image of God
Image justification
Question about God
The most important thing about God to know
Questions about God
God's unknowability: His being and origin
God's causal powers
Death and afterlife
God's moral agency
Communication with God
Other philosophical-theological questions
One God among many
Notes
Chapter 6: Teachers' perceptions of young children's abilities for RE learning
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Teachers' statements
Note
Chapter 7: Religious understanding in the early years: What can RE learn from young children?
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Cognitive-developmental case for primary RE
Relevance of psychological research to primary RE
Problems with child-centred RE and its agreed syllabuses
RE teacher-training challenges
How can psychological research contribute to primary RE?
Note
References
Author Index
Subject Index
