What Do Children Think About Virtues? Research on an Educative Activity

This paper presents “MelArete” which is an educative and research project. The educative process aims to encourage children to reflect on ethical concepts in order to develop an ethical posture of thinking. The research process aims to explore children’s ethical thinking in relationship to different learning experiences. The educative path is structured in twelve meetings between the researcher and the class. This paper focus on the activity carried out during the third meeting, when children were encouraged to reflect on what virtues are and on how they can be learned. Collected data were analyzed through a qualitative approach, following a methodological crossbreeding between the phenomenological-eidetic method and the grounded theory. Results highlight what children think about virtues and their learning.