Counteract ethical illiteracy through the promotion of ethical awareness starting in pre-school. First results of a qualitative research study

The present contribution aims to present the analysis of the initial data from the research Reflecting Together: A Curriculum for Ethical-Social Education Starting from Early Childhood Education. Specifically, it seeks to elucidate the correlation between ethical illiteracy and the promotion of ethical awareness from early childhood. The theories of complexity and socio-constructivism provide the epistemological backdrop for this research. The chosen methodological framework is the Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT), valued for its ethical inclination, thus aligning with the research subject and epistemology. Firstly, an area of investigation was delineated: the nexus between education and ethics. As suggested by Charmaz, this avoided projecting towards the validation of hypotheses stemming from reviews of scientific literature or previous empirical works, instead focusing on formulating one or more research questions. The process commences with sensitizing concepts, complemented by the researcher’s personal and disciplinary interests. In this case, these sensitizing concepts gave rise to the research: ethically oriented education, ethical competence, and shared reflection on values. Data collection ensued through intensive interviews. The sample comprises over thirty key informants (university professors, pedagogues, and primarily, early childhood educators) operating across ten Italian regions. Interviews were conducted throughout 2023, and analysis commenced concurrently with data collection, as per CGT methodology. Thus, the data were co-constructed in the interaction among research participants, scientific literature, and the researcher, facilitating the exchange and comparison of diverse perspectives. Interpretative work led to identifying a predominant core category and its properties, which, alongside the relationships between categories, will form the grounded theory, rooted in data. The pivotal objectives guiding this research are twofold: to explore the process of engagement between education and values in the context of early childhood education and to delve into the role of the teacher in the realm of ethical education, examining how educators’ ethical awareness may impact the promotion of similar competence in children. The identified context is early childhood education - attended by children aged 3 to 6 - as one of the initial points of entry into a community beyond the familial sphere, alongside childcare centers, albeit significantly more uniformly distributed nationwide. Furthermore, early childhood education serves as an extremely fertile ground for ethical educational work within a democratic cohabitation framework. The emerged core category is ethical awareness - closely linked to the concepts of personal intelligences and self-awareness - whose promotion significantly impacts the phenomenon of ethical illiteracy, serving as the capacity for observation, analysis, and reflection on one’s and others’ actions, contrasting with the lack of awareness characterizing ethical illiteracy. In this contribution, the research design will be described, with particular attention to methodology and epistemology, and then the first data that emerged will be explored, namely the definition of the two categories - ethical awareness and ethical illiteracy - and, finally, their correlation. In fact, it is hypothesised on the basis of the analysis and interpretation of the interviews and the literature that the promotion of awareness starting from pre-school may be an effective strategy to combat ethical illiteracy.