Brendan Hyde

Photo of Brendan Hyde

Executive Committee Member and Chair

I am a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia and the newly elected Chair of the International Association for Children’s Spirituality. I attained my PhD from Australian Catholic University in 2006, investigating the characteristics of children’s spirituality, and I have researched in children’s spirituality for more than 20 years now. I was also a co-convenor of the International Conference on Children’s Spirituality in 2008 (in Ballarat, Australia) as well as a previous co-editor of International Journal of Children’s Spirituality (2009-2017).

More recently, I have investigated how the affordances of environments (in particular early childhood centres and school classrooms) can nurture children’s spirituality, as well as they ways in which neoliberal cultures of performativity in education can stifle children’s spiritual voices.


Additionally, I am a Fellow at the Centre for the Theology of Childhood (presently located in Denver Colorado), and a trained Godly Play storyteller.