Abstract
The goal of this research was to clarify the moral development of children through moral lessons at school, based on a sociocultural approach. Descriptions of morality related reading provided by first grade elementary school children were treated as language mediated morality, and changes in these descriptions were analyzed longitudinally over a five-month period. We found that participants initially copied the sample expressions when they described “mind expression cards” that were used to express their emotions visibly in class, but at a later age they began to rearrange the expressions or to create original expressions. In addition, most students who rearranged expressions wrote multiple thoughts and noted the conflicts among their ideas. This exploration of moral development through moral lessons therefore suggests that children appropriate language representing multiple points of view into their own expressions. This language can be considered “vernacular moral language.” However, the data also suggest that this moral developmental shift was not a step upward in a hierarchical progression, but rather a spiral progression depending on the changing contents of lessons and “mind expression cards.”
