Developing meaningful ways of listening to children's views has been reinforced through legislation and this has led to new approaches, such as 'spiritual listening', being developed. 'Spiritual listening' aims to listen to children's views on philosophical concepts such as drive, destiny, happiness and purpose. The authors believe that this can support children to explore how they construct meaning in their lives and to explore connections between aspects of their behaviour or experience and their underlying belief structures. This article outlines research that formed part of a project aiming to extend the original spiritual listening research. One of the central aims was to explore children's responses to spiritual listening questions and to consider how this information develops our understanding of children's spiritual and philosophical beliefs. The research methods consisted of conducting semi-structured interviews, using the spiritual listening questions, with 20 participants (aged 10-11 years). The researchers used grounded theory to analyse children's responses and explore patterns within the data. The authors found that the children responded in interesting, varied and multifarious ways, which led to further conclusions about how this approach could be used in the future.
This paper develops a thesis that listening to children and young people (CYP) can be enhanced and promoted through attending to their deeper attitudes and ideas which underpin motivation. It is argued that questionnaires, checklists and closed questions are useful, to a degree, but may be restrictive and limited in eliciting significant views.Following a brief background literature review of earlier work in the area of listening to children, the paper focuses on our most recent research direction, namely using conversations, around classical Socratic and philosophical, spiritual questions as a method of enabling children to elaborate their deep attitudes to life. The authors describe and discuss a tool they have developed, based upon empirical research, which could be of value to Educational Psychologists (EPs) and other professionals. An important feature of the development of this tool was the involvement of CYP as part of the research and production team. This tool, entitled ‘A Little Box of Big Questions’ (LBBQ), contains four subsets of questions, presented on colourful, illustrated cards: Identity; Important People; Meaning and Purpose; and Thinking and Planning.The authors believe that such conversations, which can throw light on the child’s viewpoints and stances, could underpin future action and self-understanding and facilitate empowerment. Evidence to date shows that the tool is workable with children aged 8 to 14 years, who enjoy responding to the questions, and they say very interesting things. Further on-going work with colleagues in the UK and Australia is mentioned, and finally some implications for use are suggested.
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