The Psycho-Didactic Approach in Religious and Moral Education. Towards Personal Growth and Positive Mental Health of Students

Małgorzata Steć,Małgorzata Maria Kulik

doi:10.3390/rel12060424

Małgorzata Steć, Małgorzata Maria Kulik

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12060424

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Abstract

The psycho-didactic approach in education is becoming more and more popular. Its supporters emphasize the great values that are associated with the implementation of this approach to various fields of science and school subjects. The greatest value of the psycho-didactic approach is supporting the personal growth of the learner by respecting the developmental factors involved in each subject’s learning processes. Psycho-didactics could also be used in the design of core curricula and their implementation in the field of religious, ethical, and moral education. By supporting personal development through moral and religious education, it is possible to simultaneously influence the agencyof each learner. Personal agency in self-development, as well as in religious and moral development, is one of the greatest challenges for modern education and one of the most significant issues of positive mental health advancement in the field of education. Within psycho-didactics, it becomes possible to foster every student in an individual way, therefore all methods and techniques used in the psycho-didactic approach are focused on the student’s needs.

Highlights

This paper focuses mainly on the meeting point between educational psychology and the didactics of religion and ethics in order to establish a new quality of moral education for adolescents and adults
Psycho-didactics is a pedagogical approach in which psychological knowledge is used to organize and to support the ongoing teaching and learning processes to the extent to which the process itself contributes to the personal growth of each student
This paper aims to show that it is possible to implement the methods of the psycho-didactic approach to support individual spiritual and moral development in the course of the education of ethics and religion, understood as a specific school subject

Summary

Introduction

This paper focuses mainly on the meeting point between educational psychology and the didactics of religion and ethics in order to establish a new quality of moral education for adolescents and adults. Psycho-didactics, in general, aims to introduce a new quality of pedagogical outcomes, which combines psychological, didactic, methodological, and thematic knowledge into one, and which should be treated as a completely new, innovative school and teaching environment, and technology, fostering the personal and cognitive development of students. The psycho-didactic approach promotes, inter alia, the autonomy of the student, connecting learning with the individual learning needs, authenticity, learning by making mistakes (the so-called process of conceptualization) (Kamińska 2018) It seems that the interdisciplinary potential of psycho-didactics is its quintessential feature, which can be used to create programs to support religious and moral education and, contribute to overall personality development. The psycho-didactic approach is strongly related to person-centered teaching (Rogers et al 2014) As such, it appears to be the most relevant approach to organizing the didactic process in the field of moral and religious education. At the same time, this acquisition causes problems that the students and teachers must manage within the subject-centered approach

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