At a time when young children can spend as much as 90 percent of their waking hours indoors and are more likely to encounter a ladybird on a screen than in a garden, a team of Malaysian education researchers has unveiled a plan to bring childhood and the natural world back into contact—and to use that reunion to nurture something secular classrooms rarely address: spirituality. Writing in the open-access journal Discover Education, Liau Eva and Abdul Halim Masnan of Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, together with Tee Ying Qin of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, present a conceptual framework for a Nature Loving Education Teaching (NLET) module, a structured preschool curriculum designed to cultivate what the authors define as children’s universal spiritual capacities—awe, connectedness and meaning-making—through deliberate, developmentally calibrated engagement with the natural environment. Crucially, the framework achieves this without any religious instruction, positioning nature itself as the neutral classroom in which children discover that they are participants in a living community larger than themselves.

The intellectual urgency behind the proposal rests on a growing body of evidence documenting childhood’s quiet retreat from the outdoors. Research cited by the team indicates that children today spend up to 90 percent of their time indoors and engage extensively with digital devices, a displacement driven by urbanisation and technological immersion and compounded by the confinement of the COVID-19 pandemic, which measurably weakened children’s connection to nature. The consequences extend beyond nostalgia: diminished contact with natural environments limits opportunities for exploration, environmental empathy and essential life skills, with long-term implications for well-being and pro-environmental attitudes. Richard Louv’s influential notion of “nature deficit disorder” crystallised these concerns, while Louise Chawla’s research has shown that early experiences in nature play a decisive role in shaping ethical values, emotional bonds with the living world and enduring pro-environmental orientations. Nature engagement, the literature suggests, fosters not only environmental stewardship but spiritual development expressed through wonder, respect for life and awareness of interdependence—the emotional and spiritual architecture of who children become.

Central to the framework is a deliberately secular, rigorously operationalised definition of spirituality. The authors are explicit that in early childhood spirituality is not confined to religious instruction; it encompasses children’s sense of wonder, empathy, meaning-making and connection with the natural world. Drawing on Brenda Hyde’s account of young children’s innate capacity to relate to something greater than themselves, and on Jennifer Mata-McMahon’s characterisation of spirituality as a universal developmental domain transcending cultural and religious boundaries, the team separates the construct from its nearest conceptual neighbours. Moral education, they note, targets ethical values, moral reasoning and behaviour; socio-emotional learning emphasises emotional regulation, self-awareness and interpersonal competence. Spirituality, by contrast, concerns a child’s developing sense of awe, connectedness and meaning—a distinct yet complementary strand of holistic development. The distinction carries practical weight in Malaysia’s multicultural, multi-religious society, where any classroom initiative touching the spiritual must avoid doctrine while remaining educationally substantive. The NLET framework is engineered to navigate that boundary, omitting religious doctrines, theology and rituals entirely and anchoring every activity in the religiously neutral space of the natural environment, allowing adaptation across national, vernacular and private preschool settings.

The proposal emerges from a policy landscape that is ambitious on paper yet uneven in practice. Malaysia’s National Preschool Curriculum Standard, known as KSPK, already recognises spiritual values through its emphasis on moral and religious development, and the revised curriculum, KP2027, strengthens that direction by foregrounding holistic well-being, values formation, sustainability awareness and meaningful learning connected to the environment. Yet classroom implementation frequently remains limited and ritualistic—centred on routine activities such as singing songs, with minimal opportunity for reflection or nature-based inquiry—because teachers often lack the pedagogical knowledge and resources to translate spiritual goals into daily practice. The result, the authors contend, is that spirituality functions as a hidden or passive curriculum rather than an intentionally nurtured aspect of child development. Their answer is a structured teaching module that equips preschool teachers with practical strategies for integrating nature-loving education into everyday routines, supported by the love-based teacher–child relationships that researcher Yen-Hui Shih identifies as the baseline from which children confidently explore their inner worlds. Such an approach, they argue, could simultaneously advance children’s spiritual growth, moral and ethical development and environmental responsibility.

Conceptually, the module stands on four theoretical pillars woven into a single pedagogical architecture. Constructivist learning theory—from Jean Piaget’s portrayal of children as active builders of knowledge to Lev Vygotsky’s emphasis on social interaction—frames nature as a spiritually meaningful learning context in which children construct inner meaning through direct encounters, reflective dialogue and symbolic expression, extending constructivism beyond cognition into value formation. The Biophilia Hypothesis, Edward O. Wilson’s proposition that humans possess an innate affiliation with other living things, supplies the rationale for nature as the primary learning medium, with the authors positioning biophilic engagement as a foundational mechanism for care, empathy, responsibility and reverence for life rather than a mere affective response. James Fowler’s Faith Development Theory legitimises the imaginative, intuitive meaning-making of preschoolers—the intuitive–projective stage—as an authentic, observable form of spiritual expression rather than immature cognition, treating children’s storytelling and symbolic interpretations of nature as genuine spiritual processes. Finally, Lisa Miller’s Spiritual Child Theory conceptualises spirituality as an innate but nurture-able human capacity that can be strengthened through relationships, reflective practices and engagement with nature. Together, the authors argue, these frameworks converge in structured nature-loving pedagogy.

What elevates the paper beyond purely theoretical territory is its insistence that spirituality be made observable and measurable. The framework operationalises children’s spirituality through three interrelated dimensions: awe or wonder, defined as children’s spontaneous experiences of fascination and curiosity toward nature; connectedness, their emotional and relational awareness of themselves, others and the natural world; and meaning-making, their capacity to construct, interpret and express personal understanding through meaningful encounters with nature. Each dimension is captured through a multi-method triangulation strategy designed to minimise subjectivity. Structured classroom observations will employ standardised behavioural checklists and anecdotal record templates, coding awe through sustained attention, spontaneous verbal expressions of curiosity and focused exploration, and connectedness through documented relational behaviours such as gentle handling of living things, verbal expressions of care and collaborative helping actions. Child drawings produced after nature-based activities will be analysed against thematic criteria for symbolic representations of ecological relationships and visual emphasis on environmental features of personal significance. Brief, semi-structured, child-friendly interviews, conducted immediately after the drawing sessions in familiar classroom surroundings, will elicit children’s narratives through open-ended prompts standardised to reduce the risk of leading questions. Converging evidence across the three streams, the authors argue, reduces observer bias and strengthens the trustworthiness of interpretations of young children’s spiritual expressions.

The research design follows Design and Development Research, or DDR, a methodology suited to systematically designing, developing and evaluating educational products grounded in both theory and real-world practice. The study is planned in three sequential phases. Phase I, a needs analysis, will survey a purposive sample of 100 preschool teachers and conduct semi-structured interviews with seven parents to map their understanding, challenges and instructional needs around nature-based spiritual learning, while curriculum documents including KSPK and KP2027 are reviewed to determine how thoroughly spirituality, character education and nature engagement are addressed in policy. Phase II moves to design and development, in which learning objectives, module components and nature-based activities are constructed and subjected to formal expert validation. Here the team deploys the Fuzzy Delphi Method, a consensus-building technique that converts qualitative expert judgment into quantified agreement, with a panel of 11 specialists in early childhood education, nature-loving education and children’s spirituality. The method will establish mathematical consensus on essential module elements, pedagogical strategies and the behavioural items within the measurement tools, ensuring indicators that are theoretically sound, culturally sensitive and developmentally appropriate for the Malaysian preschool context.

Phase III will carry the prototype into authentic preschool classrooms. Before implementation, the accompanying assessment instruments—observation protocols, behavioural checklists, drawing tasks and interview guides—will undergo expert validation for content validity and developmental appropriateness. Selected teachers will then implement the module over a specified period, with data gathered through teacher evaluation surveys gauging usability, practicality and appropriateness, alongside structured classroom observations, children’s drawings and brief interviews examining the three spiritual indicators during nature-based activities. Importantly, the authors frame this phase as formative evaluation: the goal is to collect feedback for further refinement rather than to establish summative effectiveness, a deliberately cautious stance reflecting the framework’s provisional status. Each phase, in the logic of the design, generates the evidence needed to justify the next, creating a structured pathway from abstract theory to validated instructional product.

The implications stretch well beyond Malaysian preschools. Nationally, the NLET module aligns with KP2027’s pillars of holistic development, values formation and sustainability, offering teachers a structured yet flexible framework for translating abstract curricular aspirations into observable classroom practice and repositioning educators as facilitators of reflective, relational learning rather than transmitters of prescribed content. Globally, the authors connect the framework to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.7, which calls for education promoting sustainable development, environmental citizenship and global values, arguing that long-term environmental stewardship is rooted in a child’s earliest relationship with the natural world. The framework also embraces a relational, ecological worldview—evoked metaphorically as a “one world family”—in which children perceive themselves not as dominators of nature but as interdependent members of a shared moral and ecological community. Whether deliberate pedagogy can reliably cultivate awe, compassion, gratitude and connectedness at scale remains, the researchers acknowledge, an open empirical question, and they present their model as provisional pending systematic investigation. But by articulating a coherent conceptual and methodological foundation—and insisting that even something as intangible as a child’s sense of wonder can be defined, observed and nurtured without doctrine—the study offers educators a credible starting point for reintroducing the natural world, and the meaning it affords, into the earliest years of education.