Cultivating Emotional Awareness in Early Childhood through Mindfulness-Based Play: A Classroom Action Research Reconsidered through Secular and Islamic Contemplative Frameworks

Abstract

Emotional awareness is treated in developmental literature as a load-bearing structure, not a decorative feature, of early social competence. Children who cannot name what they feel do not simply lack a skill; they lack the interpretive apparatus through which every later negotiation with peers, teachers, and their own impulses gets conducted. This study reports a two-cycle classroom action research (Penelitian Tindakan Kelas) conducted with seven children aged 5–6 years at PAUD Al-Muhsinin, testing a sequence of mindfulness-based play activities, including feeling cards, an emotion tree, expressive movement games, and simple breath awareness exercises, as a means of cultivating emotional recognition, verbal labelling, and early empathic response. Unlike much of the applied literature on classroom mindfulness, which tends to report gains as though the underlying construct and its measurement were settled matters, this article treats both as contested. It situates the intervention against two bodies of scholarship that are rarely read together: the social cognitive neuroscience account of mindfulness as a self-regulatory mechanism, including its unresolved evidentiary status, and the Islamic contemplative tradition of tazkiyat al-nafs and tarbiyat al-wijdan, in which emotional refinement is inseparable from moral and theological formation rather than a value-neutral psychological technique. Qualitative observation across two cycles indicated a shift from reactive, undifferentiated emotional expression toward more differentiated labelling and rudimentary empathic statements, alongside a persistent minority of children for whom the intervention produced compliance rather than internalization, a distinction the action-research design was not built to resolve. The article argues that the pedagogical value of the intervention is real but structurally overstated by the single-group, teacher-as-researcher design that produced it, and it proposes a revised methodological and theoretical agenda, including comparison conditions, standardized instruments, and explicit engagement with Islamic early childhood education (PIAUD) epistemology, for future inquiry in this field