Virtues at theater: an educative research on respect in primary school

Abstract

Nowadays, a commitment to ethical education, which can find a privileged context of implementation in schools, seems more urgent than ever. Starting from this premise, the essay presents an educative research, which has been
implemented in a second grade primary school class and provided for: a) a theatrical pathway to encourage the children’s ethical reflection, and b) a qualitative research to understand what meanings the involved children attributed to respect, in its declinations for the other’s body, for the shared environment and the objects within it, and for the
other in general. After presenting the theoretical framework of the project, the educative pathway and the heuristic process will be outlined, with particular focus on the adopted analysis method and on the results that emerged.