The Good in the Children’s Thinking. An Educative Research in Kindergarten and Primary School

Abstract

The paper presents MelArete, a project for ethical education promoted by CRED (Center of Educational and Didactic Research) of the University of Verona and created for children attending kindergarten and primary school. The project implies the realization of an educative path on which we carried out a qualitative research aimed at understanding children’s ethical thinking. The paper particularly focuses on the first activity of the path that implies the involvement of children in a “Socratic conversation” about good. The educational aim of the activity is to involve children in a reflection on this concept, while the heuristic aim is to allow us to understand what meanings children give to it. The collected data were analyzed through a methodological crossbreeding, which combines aspects of the phenomenological-eidetic method and of the grounded theory. The paper presents the findings which emerged in the kindergartens and primary schools involved in the research.

Keywords

• Educazione etica
• Etica delle virtù
• Ricerca educativa
• Scuola dell’infanzia
• Scuola primaria