Freedom, physicality, friendship and feeling: aspects of children's spirituality expressed through the choral reading of poetry

Reading and discussing poetry with spiritual themes can play a major role in children's spiritual development. The communal, oral recitation of poetry has been a means of spiritual expression in many faith traditions. How would children respond to such a time-honoured oral group experience with poetry? What might it reveal about their spirituality? These were the questions that prompted a qualitative study involving young people in the choral reading of poetry with spiritual themes. Participants were 19 students in a sixth-grade classroom. We held three separate sessions with the class, each focusing on an aspect of children's spirituality: relationship with the self and others, relationship with the natural world, and relationship with a reality beyond the material world. Findings indicate that the choral-reading experience did provide the children an opportunity to express their spirituality, but in ways we did not anticipate. It was not the content of the poems that they pointed to as providing means for their spiritual expression, but rather aspects of the process of choral reading: freedom in interpretation, physicality in interpretation; a sense of friendship, of a safe, interpretive community; and the opportunity to express their 'feelings', their emotions.