ABSTRACT
Given the enhanced prominence of religion across globally ever-more acute cultural pluralization across nation-states worldwide, research on religion in education is an area of correspondingly heightened ethical sensitivity. Identifying a lacuna on ethical guidance for research specific to religion and worldview research in early childhood education and care, this chapter offers a set of eight parameters to guide ethical research in this sub-field. We argue that the codification of ethical research practice actually had in fact its origins in the culturally, ideologically and religiously discriminatory context of Nazi atrocities and the post-Second World War trials which brought these to light. In many ways, we argue, the particularities of this historical setting heighten the importance of ethical research practice today. We thus provide a historical assessment of the origins and ends (or purposes) of ethics in social science and educational research as arising from the specific historicity of the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics which subsequently emerged from this post-Nazi context. Showing how across the social and educational sciences ethical considerations came relatively late (several decades after the Nuremberg Code), we show how the particularities of ethically guided research on religion in education came even later. In this context, if ethically guided research early childhood education and care (here ‘ECEC’) has itself, too, only gathered recent conceptual momentum, the particular issues relating to research on religion and worldviews in ECEC have themselves remained still somewhat neglected. In the light of this lacuna, we tentatively offer a set of eight benchmark parameters for ethical research on religion and worldviews in ECEC.
