What do the words ‘good’ and ‘care’ mean for children?: A research question from an educative activity

In this paper, we present “MelArete”, an educative and research project aimed at educating children to virtue ethics and exploring children’s ethical thinking. In the last year (2016-2017), the project involved six fourth-grade classes of primary schools located in two cities in the North and in the Centre of Italy. The educative path implied twelve meetings between the researcher and the children: during each meeting, the children were involved in activities aimed at promoting ethical reflections. In this paper we focus on the activity organized during the first meeting, when we read a story used as a stimulus to activate a Socratic conversation with children about the concepts of “good” and “care”. The analysis of the collected data has been carried out following a qualitative methodological crossbreeding between phenomenological-eidetic method and the grounded theory. In this paper we present the coding system which represents the first outcome of the analysis process. The findings highlight the richness of children’s ethical thinking and allow to understand what the words “good” and “care” mean for them.