This space provides brief details of practitioners and academics working in a variety of situations within the realm of Children’s Spirituality. All are available for consultancy and can be contacted through this website.
Tony Eaude
Dr. Tony Eaude was the head teacher of a multi-cultural Church of England First School in Oxford, UK, for nine years before completing a doctorate, entitled Beyond Awe and Wonder- a study of how teachers understand young children’s spiritual development. He now works as an independent research consultant, trading as ‘New Perspectives…’ He has been a regular attender at the International Conferences on Children’s Spirituality and is Books Review Editor for the International Journal of Children’s Spirituality.
Tony Eaude’s interests and expertise are wide-ranging in areas associated with young children’s education and especially their spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. He is committed to a view of children’s spirituality which reflects this as a common human need, while recognising the distinctive contribution of faith communities. This is reflected in his 2006 book Children’s Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Development – Primary and Early Years, published by Learning Matters, Exeter and particularly aimed at teachers in training. He has also published on themes associated with values, creativity and cultural diversity. In 2011, he published Thinking Through Pedagogy for Primary and Early Years, also with Learning Matters, encouraging students and teachers to think deeply about the complexity of classrooms and about the ‘whole child.’
New Perspectives on Young Children’s Moral Education: Developing Character through a Virtue Ethics Approach was published in 2016 by Bloomsbury. Tony is currently working on a new book Identity, culture and belonging: educating young children for a changing world to be published by Bloomsbury Academic, in 2019 or 2020. He is also leading a project to raise the profile of the humanities in primary schools, building on a themed issue of the journal Education 3-13 which he co-edited and which was published in 2017.
How do expert primary classteachers really work? – a critical guide for teachers, headteachers and teacher educators was published by Critical Publishing in 2012. This draws on the literature on expertise in general and on teacher expertise to provide a nuanced view of the complexity of the primary classroom teacher’s role and how this is carried out by those with a high level of expertise. In early 2018, his book Developing the Expertise of Primary and Elementary Classroom Teachers: Professional Learning for a Changing World was published by Bloomsbury, considering how such expertise is developed across the whole continuum of teachers’ lives.
Tony is available to lead training sessions and days and/or to speak at, or lead, seminars and conferences both in the UK and elsewhere. He would be interested to hear from those interested in collaboration on research, especially in cross-cultural contexts and on cross-disciplinary themes.
More details of Tony’s work can be seen on his website www.edperspectives.org.uk. Those interested in this or any aspects of his work are invited to email him at tony@edperspectives.org.uk