Thinking Faithfully Together: Catholic Religious Education, Ethics, and the Philosophy for Children Pedagogy

Abstract

This conceptual article examines how Catholic Religious Education (CRE) and Ethics in Maltese schools might enter a constructive pedagogical dialogue while retaining distinct disciplinary identities. Rather than proposing curricular merger, hierarchy, or a common epistemology, it advances the more limited claim that a critically appropriated Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogy and its Community of Inquiry (CoI) can function as a shared pedagogical grammar. The Maltese case is analytically useful because Ethics is institutionally associated with P4C while recent CRE studies call for more student-centred, constructivist, and existentially responsive approaches. The article treats this proximity as a problem of disciplined borrowing: which dialogical practices can travel across subject boundaries, under what conditions, and what must remain discipline-specific? Drawing on Lipman and sustained critical engagement with Dewey, Freire, Arendt, and Merton, it identifies complementary but non-identical resources for experience-based inquiry, dialogical agency, judgement in plurality, and contemplative attention. Their tensions are retained rather than harmonised. Recent empirical and theoretical literature is used to qualify the scope of the proposal. The resulting framework develops implications for classroom practice, assessment, collaborative professional development, and future empirical research. Its contribution is therefore a bounded model of pedagogical dialogue: CRE may become more dialogical without treating theological sources as interchangeable with philosophical warrants, while Ethics may engage religiously situated moral worlds without compromising philosophical autonomy.