Lived Moral Pedagogy: Enacting Moral Education Through Experience, Culture, and Religion in Indonesian Early Childhood Classrooms

Abstract

Moral stimulation in early childhood education has received growing attention. However, relatively little is known about how teachers construct and enact moral pedagogy beyond the boundaries of formal educational theory. This study explores how Indonesian early childhood teachers foster children’s moral development through experience, culture, and religion. Using a qualitative approach, data were collected from 46 teachers enrolled in a Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) program. Participants responded to a series of open-ended questions administered through an online questionnaire. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Four interrelated themes emerged from the analysis. First, teachers viewed moral values as principles that must be personally embodied and practiced before being taught to children. Second, moral values were enacted through everyday pedagogical practices, including habituation, modeling, storytelling, dialogue, and play. Third, teachers drew upon lived experience, cultural traditions, and religious teachings as the primary foundations for moral education. Finally, they emphasized that the sustainability of moral education depends on consistency across home, school, and digital environments. This study proposes Lived Moral Pedagogy as a contextual, embodied, and practice-based framework for understanding moral education in early childhood settings. The framework extends conventional models of moral education by shifting attention from the mere transmission of moral values and curriculum implementation toward the lived enactment of morality in everyday life, mediated through teachers’ identities and experiences, cultural traditions, and religious values. The findings have implications for teacher education, early childhood curriculum development, and educational policy by highlighting the importance of cultivating teachers’ moral identity and relational capacity, as well as the significance of culturally grounded pedagogical judgment.