Ética e religiosidade: uma abordagem psico-pedagógica de crianças da primeira série do ensino fundamental I

Abstract

This paper deals with an important issue to current educators. The starting point was my own experience as a teacher and my need to understand the ethical-religious development. It focuses on children's religious manifestations and its ethical dimensions. The starting point is the idea that the teacher must notice the student in his complexity and acknowledge all aspects of his personal development, going from affective competence acquisition to emotional, cognitive, ethical, socio-cultural and spiritual development. The school is, or should be, a competent place for the harmonious development of these skills. The origin of the child's development appears in his first few years of age. It is in the nursing stage that the child builds up a relation of trust for himself and others. This is the psychological seed of religiosity and of human ethics. The child's first years of life are the basis for all his personal and social development. I will present the various aspects that influence and characterize the child's sociocognitive development. The school is seen as a place where a new relationship with the world is established. It is in the school that the child will set up new relations with people such as teachers, staff members and other students who surround his small family environment. In the global development process and having focus on the ethical-religious, religiosity is a dimension of the human being in which he either grows or stops growing. I chose Piaget as the author to present the studies referring to the cognitive and ethical-religious development of the child. This paper highlights the ethical development of the human being and takes Kohlberg as a reference. He outstands as one of the most important researchers in the moral development areas. Like Piaget, he sees the child as an autonomous individual capable of identifying universal values, but only gradually constructing his vision of the world and of moral. Both Piaget and Kohlberg focus not on the guilty feeling or the real moral behavior, but on the moral judgment, the understanding of right and wrong which builds up through the phases. This work will deal more specifically with the theoretical part and the empirical research that analyzes the way first graders (seven to eight-year olds) of a catholic school behave when faced with ethical-religious dilemmas. These cases were taken from genuine everyday life of these children