Consultancy from the International Association for Children's Spirituality: Rebecca Nye
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.
Rebecca Nye
Dr Rebecca Nye has been working in the field of children's spirituality as a researcher, consultant and practitioner since 1994. She is currently a Reader in Education at Anglia Ruskin University, and UK trainer for accredited Godly Play courses. She is often available for freelance work with LEAs, Dioceses, HE institutions, health and social care settings as well as local organisations including churches and schools. She also enjoys offering academic supervision (MA/Phd).
One of her interests is understanding spirituality from psychological perspectives, especially how a child's psychology presents natural opportunties for spiritual processing. Drawing on her landmark empirical study of children talking about their spirituality on their own terms (with David Hay), Dr Nye suggests spirituality in childhood is essentially relational in nature and function, but that it is also often subject to neglect and decline.
Another focus of her work is the problematic role of language in development of spirituality, especially the use and abuse of religious language in education. She is responsible for the introduction of Berryman's Godly Play to the UK, Germany and Finland - a radical approach to imaginative religious education more like spiritual direction, which is sensitive to both verbal and non verbal aspects of spiritual language. Godly Play's implementation and implications for schools - as RE and as social and emotional education- is also an area of her concern.
Dr Nye's work now includes how (adult) communities are challenged and transformed by engaging with new understandings about children's spirituality - in terms of both thinking and practice. Here her work has included consultancy with Churches of many denominations, the Centre for Jewish Education, and the Cambridge Theological Federation. In this regard, she has a special interest in the dialogue between theological understanding about childhood and the new field of children's spirituality.