Re‐conceptualizing Critical Thinking for Moral Education in Culturally Plural Societies

This paper critically examines the contemporary educational discourse on critical thinking as one of the primary aims of education, its modernist defence and its postmodernist criticism, so as to explore a new way of conceptualizing critical thinking for moral education. What is at stake in this task is finding a plausible answer to the question of how the teaching of critical thinking in moral education can contribute to leading young people to avoid moral relativism while at the same time to develop a coherent way of responding to cultural pluralism. The paper takes Bernard Williams's concept of ‘ethical reflection’ as a possible candidate and explores this concept as a means of accommodating these concerns.     

Post‐Experience Business Education

Summary

This paper provides a comparative analysis of data arising from three recent surveys of equal opportunity practice in relation to race, gender and disability. The surveys gathered information from a range of university departments and included questions about departmental structures and organisation as well as curriculum development. Instances of good practice are described, and some implications explored for the further development of equal opportunities in higher education.     

Affect and the Moral‐Conventional Distinction

Abstract

The effect of inducing negative, positive or neutral affect on the recall of moral and conventional transgressions and positive moral and conventional acts was examined. It was found that inducing negative affect was associated with higher recall of moral transgressions while inducing positive affect was associated with higher recall of positive moral acts. Affect induction condition did not have a significant effect on the recall of the conventional transgressions or positive acts. The results are interpreted within the Violence Inhibition Mechanism model of moral development (Blair, 1995) and by reference to a new, hypothesised system, the Smiling Reward Response.     

Moral Weakness,Moral Education and Self‐deception

Abstract

Despite the apparent advantages of incorporating logographic symbols in procedures intended to teach children with severe learning difficulties to recognise words, such procedures have never proved successful. Their failure has been attributed to a blocking effect that is induced by the additional cues. The blocking effect account predicts that any method that involves introducing additional stimulus cues will be inefficient for teaching word recognition, compared with a word alone method. A new technique was devised in an attempt to surmount this problem. The basis of the technique draws on a range of research areas. Children who had no reading skills and had previously failed to gain any sight vocabulary were taught to recognise 12 words. An experiment compared a word alone method with two variants of the new technique. Both versions were more successful than the word alone method at teaching the children to recognise the words. The findings refute the view that any procedure that incorporates additional cues will necessarily be ineffective. For students who have hitherto made no progress at all in learning to recognise words, the new technique offers an effective instructional procedure.     

Education for Critical Thinking: Can it be non‐indoctrinative?

An ideal of education is to ensure that our children develop into autonomous critical thinkers. The ‘indoctrination objection’, however, calls into question whether education, aimed at cultivating autonomous critical thinkers, is possible. The core of the concern is that since the young child lacks even modest capacities for assessing reasons, the constituent components of critical thinking have to be indoctrinated if there is to be any hope of the child's attaining the ideal. Our primary objective is to defuse this objection. We argue, first, that even if the indoctrination objection can be dealt with at the level of beliefs by an account that distinguishes between beliefs instilled in the child at the non‐rational stage that are indoctrinative and those that are non‐indoctrinative, there can be non‐autonomous ‘proto critical thinkers’ who lack autonomy with respect to the requisite motivational components. We then ask what must be added to the account to ensure that proto critical thinkers develop into autonomous ones. We suggest that motivational elements, even if instilled at a stage at which the child has insufficiently developed cognitive capacities, can be ‘truly the child's own’ only relationally: the autonomous motivational elements are ones with respect to which the future child is self‐governing.     

Moral Reasoning: its Relation to Logical Thinking and Role‐Taking

This article explores the possibilities of reinforcing ethics education at the university level within the context of new internationalisation processes. The situation in Spain is used as a case study. The article begins with a review of the rationale behind this issue and goes on to analyse the place of the ethical dimension in education in the proposals for adapting Spanish university degree programmes to the European Higher Education Area. Fieldwork carried out at three higher education institutions reveals that, while professors accept the institutional function of the university in ethics education, their hazy conception of the matter weakens the likelihood of a pedagogical approach in‐keeping with the level of importance given to such a function.     

Equal Opportunities and Post‐Sixteen Education: strategies for institutional change,possibilities and constraints

In this paper we describe findings from a research project in the South West of England that enquired into the impact of the changing requirements of programmes leading to teaching qualifications in the FE sector. We utilise the metaphor of ‘learning journey’ as a heuristic to discuss the professional formation of student teachers in training. In so doing, we challenge oversimplified models and assumptions of progress and learning as a linear progression by demonstrating the complexity of student transitions during professional formation.     

Total Quality Management,the Learning Organisation and Post‐compulsory Education

Abstract

The turbulence confronting educational Institutions In the United Kingdom has led to the suggestion that any attempt to respond using established management principles and processes is likely to be dysfunctional. Total quality management (TQM) has been advanced as a strategy that will enable educational institutions adapt to the greater market orientation and transform them into learning organisations. The paper identifies the key principles of TQM, critically reviewing the literature that examines their application in education and focusing on the post‐compulsory sector. Secondly, selected linkages between the key principles and other approaches to the study of organisational behaviour, including aspects of open systems theory, leadership, teamworking, training and staff development, and organisational culture, are examined. The concept of the learning organisation is outlined and its relationship with TQM examined. The paper concludes that TQM treats organisational change issues in educational institutions and the concept of the learning organisation as unproblematic, Ignoring Issues of power, authority, resistance to change and double‐loop learning.     

Post‐School educational opportunities for disabled young adults

Abstract

Students in the penultimate year of a Biology degree produced pilot videos on microbiological topics using camcorders. Videos were intended for use as school teaching aids: the ‘best’ video was selected for subsequent professional production. The organisation, assessment and evaluation of the project are described.     

The Construction and Challenges of Australia's Post‐binary System of Higher Education

Abstract

In 1988 Australia commenced the transition to a post‐binary system of higher education as the UK is currently doing. In both countries the generally acknowledged obsolescence of the dual system had provoked the structural change. In Australia, the new direction was also motivated by official concerns that the universities be made more accessible to government priorities, particularly economic priorities, at a time of national economic decline. Unlike the UK, the Australian post‐binary era has been founded on a government programme of widespread amalgamations based upon the universities.

This article explores the process of constructing the unitary system, the difficulties experienced in conceptualising the new order and its impact upon the other provider of tertiary education. The Australian approach has ignored a canon in higher education, that varied structures and types of institutions preserve diversity. Further, in contrast to Britain's gradualist path into a unitary system, Australia moved quickly to form large undifferentiated universities to serve the needs of a mass system of higher education.     

Post‐Graduate Certificate of Education Students’ Training: An Additional Alternative

Abstract

This paper contends that the growth of Quality Management (QM) has been fuelled by the government's concern for greater accountability and the rise in managerialism in higher education institutions. It also notes that some members of the academic community have perceived certain aspects of QM to be a challenge to traditional academic autonomy. The differing QM roles of the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Higher Education Quality Council are examined and various stakeholders’ initial concerns with early QM structures and systems are explored. Harvey and Green's (1993) typology is used as an analytical framework to uncover the rationale for the blend of QM that is developing. There has been the tendency to utilise more mechanistic systems such as ISO 9000 and Total Quality Management because of the problems of measurement with more qualitative approaches. The paper concludes by warning that there needs to be far greater agreement amongst stakeholders on the nature of quality and the QM structures and systems if the objective of an effective, consumer‐orientated form of higher education is to be achieved.     

Lecturing in Post‐Compulsory Education: profession,occupation or reflective practice?

Abstract

This paper argues that a new conceptualisation of teaching in post‐compulsory education is required. Taking into account the radical ideology‐driven change experienced in the sector in recent times, it is suggested that there are difficulties with the model of the lecturer as a ‘professional’, chief amongst which is that lecturers do not seem to think of themselves in this way. It is suggested that any alternative conceptualisation must: (i) take into account lecturers' own conceptions of their working practices, (ii) reflect the range of these practices, and (Hi) reflect the epistemological and ethical basis of teaching, in particular lecturers' sense of the value and worth of what they do. Finally, some implications of the proposed model of teaching for management practice and development, and the potential of the approach for theory practice and practitioners, are explored.     

Freethinkers’ Proposal for a Teaching Plan in Moral Education in Finland

Abstract

The paper which follows gives the historical and contemporary background to the present on‐going attempt of the Union of Freethinkers in Finland to gain acceptance for a new syllabus in moral education in the curriculum of Finnish schools. An outline is given of their linguistic approach to moral education which draws on many insights from thinkers and practitioners world‐wide and attempts to promote a positive identity among non‐believers. The proposal is offered as a possible model for other non‐doctrinaire teaching plans and the author would welcome any observations on its relevance and potential use in other countries of the world.     

Education for responsibility: Fifty teacher staff‐colleges

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the way discourses within early years policy and practice impose meanings onto the signifier ‘play’. Drawing on Bernstein's conceptualisation of recontextualising strategies, we explore how these meanings regulate troubling excesses in children's ‘play’. The analysis foregrounds an underlying question about the hold the signifier ‘play’ maintains within discourses that appear antithetical to traditional understandings of ‘play’.