THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF MORAL EDUCATION: THE NOTIONS OF RATIONALITY AND OBJECTIVITY REVISITED

The crucial epistemological question for formulating the principles that underlie moral education concerns the status of rationality and objectivity in ethics and education. In this essay Katariina Holma argues that the intertwined understanding of the concepts of education, ethics, rationality, and objectivity is built into our language and our thinking. She begins by delineating epistemologically adequate interpretations for the notions of rationality and objectivity. In light of these interpretations, Holma contends that the two main contemporary philosophical arguments against the possibility of ethical objectivity — the argument that derives from cultural relativism and the argument that derives from the scientific worldview — fail to refute this possibility. The epistemological notions of rationality and objectivity, as Holma interprets them in this essay, prepare the way for a moral education that combines the appreciation of personal and cultural plurality with the possibility for critical thinking and the pursuit of better understanding in the ethical realm.     

THE AIM OF THE WINNETKA CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH SCHOOL

Ethical wills are statements of values, which traditionally represent a moral, rather than material, legacy to one's posterity. As documents, they are intended to help others lead better, more fulfilling lives. Yet, the process of writing ethical wills also holds great significance for those who write them—to consolidate and articulate their personal values. In this article, ethical wills are examined as an effective tool in leadership education of youth, connecting them with the religious tradition to which they are heirs. This article focuses on Jewish youth leadership education.     

Ethical Reasoning and the Craft of Moral Practice

Abstract

Non-indoctrinational moral education involves teaching children to engage in ethical inquiry. This means that, since ethical inquiry has the status of a craft, the students will be apprentices in that craft. The classroom becomes, for this purpose, a community of ethical inquiry — an ethical atelier where students learn the tools, methods, practices and procedures which craftsmen associated with that tradition customarily utilize. It is only when one is adept at the generic procedures of reasoning that one can be adept at specifically moral reasoning, but to make the transition possible, the generic procedures should be taught within the humanistic and critical context of philosophy, and within the setting of a community of ethical inquiry.     

Social Contexts,Scholarly Inquiry,and Physical Education

Physical education lacks a set of superordinate research questions to guide our crossdiscipline, and it also lacks an overarching mission and set of goals to guide our profession. It is contended here that clarifying the possibilities and limitations that exist in our society for provision of services by experts in exercise and sports could help us to clarify the mission and goals of our profession, and this in turn could facilitate the development of a set of vital, superordinate scholarly questions around which our crossdiscipline could coalesce. This enterprise requires scholarly investigation of sports and exercise in relation to the social contexts in which they are most frequently embedded—health, leisure, and education. Sociocultural inquiry is ideally suited to examine such phenomena, and therefore it is contended that sociocultural scholars are of crucial importance to the future of our field     

The role of design ethics in maintaining students' privacy: A call to action to learning designers in higher education

Maintaining students' privacy in higher education, an integral aspect of learning design and technology integration, is not only a matter of policy and law but also a matter of design ethics. Similar to faculty educators, learning designers in higher education play a vital role in maintaining students' privacy by designing learning experiences that rely on online technology integration. Like other professional designers, they need to care for the humans they design for by not producing designs that infringe on their privacy, thus, not causing harm. Recognizing that widely used instructional design models are silent on the topic and do not address ethical considerations such as privacy, we focus this paper on how design ethics can be leveraged by learning designers in higher education in a practical manner, illustrated through authentic examples. We highlight where the ethical responsibility of learning designers comes into the foreground when maintaining students' privacy and well-being, especially in online settings. We outline an existing ethical decision-making framework and show how learning designers can use it as a call to action to protect the students they design for, strengthening their ethical design capacity.

Practitioner notes

What is already known about this topic

• Existing codes of ethical standards from well-known learning design organizations call upon learning designers to protect students' privacy without clear guidance on how to do so.
• Design ethics within learning design is often discussed in abstract ways with principles that are difficult to apply.
• Most, if not all, design models that learning design professionals have learned are either silent on design ethics and/or do not consider ethics as a valid dimension, thus, making design ethics mostly excluded from learning design graduate programs.
• Practical means for engaging in ethical design practice are scarce in the field.

What this paper adds

• A call for learning designers in higher education to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being, strengthening their ethical design capacity.
• A demonstration of how to use a practical ethical decision-making framework as a designerly tool in designing for learning to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being.
• Authentic examples—in the form of vignettes—of ethical dilemmas/issues that learning designers in higher education could face, focused on students' privacy.
• Methods—using a practical ethical decision-making framework—for learning design professionals in higher education, grounded in the philosophy of designers as the guarantors of designs, to be employed to detect situations where students' privacy and best interests are at risk.
• A demonstration of how learning designers could make stellar design decisions in service to the students they design for and not to the priorities of other design stakeholders.

Implications for practice and/or policy

• Higher education programs/institutions that prepare/employ learning designers ought to treat the topics of the designer's responsibility and design ethics more explicitly and practically as one of the means to maintain and protect students' privacy, in addition to law and policies.
• Learning designers in higher education ought to hold a powerful position in their professional practice to maintain and protect students' privacy and well-being, as an important aspect of their ethical design responsibilities.
• Learning designers in higher education ought to adopt a design thinking mindset in order to protect students' privacy by (1) challenging ideas and assumptions regarding technology integration in general and (2) detecting what is known in User Experience (UX) design as “dark patterns” in online course design.

     

走出师生关系的认识困境

师生关系历来是教育领域争论的焦点,在这一问题上,代表性观点＂主导主体＂说存在概念混淆、论述片面之弊端,而＂交互主体＂说则机械套用现象学观点,未能指出师生关系独特性的不足。要走出师生关系认识的困境,在有效清理已有观点的基础上,对实然与应然等范畴作出正确的区分,是全面、动态地认识并理解师生关系的关键。     

The role of research ethics committees: Friend or foe in educational research? An exploratory study

Ethics committees have an important role to play in ensuring ethical standards (e.g. BERA, ESRC, RCUK recommendations) are met by educational researchers. Balancing obligations to participants, society, institutions and the researchers themselves is not, however, easy. Researchers often experience the ethics committee as unsympathetic to their research endeavour, whilst ethics committees find some research approaches do not make ethical implications sufficiently explicit. This potential for misunderstanding is evident in the literature, but studies investigating how participants perceive this relationship are missing. This research comprises a novel empirical study which explores researcher perceptions of research ethics committees. Fifty-five participants in higher education departments of education responded to an online survey. Open and closed-ended questions were used to collect data on roles, methodological stance, experiences of the research ethics committee, perceived tensions and examples of good practice. The results indicated that contemporary educational researchers regard research ethics committees as friends when researcher and reviewer are transparently engaged in a shared endeavour. When this shared endeavour breaks down, for a variety of reasons—including apparently unreasonable demands or mutual misunderstanding—the research ethics committees can become foes. The difference between foe and friend lies in the quality of communication, clear systems and a culture of respectful mutual learning. The contributions of this study have practical implications for the ways that education researchers and research ethics committees relate to one another within university settings, both to alleviate areas of tension and to arrive at a shared understanding which will enable best ethical research practice.     

FALLIBILIST PLURALISM AND EDUCATION FOR SHARED CITIZENSHIP

Fallibilist pluralism is a moral and epistemological position that preserves both broadly conceived ethical pluralisms and the possibility of searching for a shared moral vision. In this essay Katariina Holma defends fallibilist pluralism as an important epistemological contribution to today's theories on citizenship education and analyzes the educational difficulties of adopting fallibilist pluralism as a conceptual framework in which citizens would encounter different others. Holma argues that to be successful, theories on citizenship education require—in addition to a justified philosophical foundation—a more profound psychological understanding of the role emotions play in human morality and moral development. Holma also analyzes two philosophical biases that tend to obscure our understanding of the central role played by emotional dispositions on encountering difference.     

Education and health over the life cycle

There is little theoretical and empirical research on the effects of education on health over the life cycle. In this article, we extend the Grossman (1972) model of the demand for health and use the extended model to analyze the effect of education on health at different ages. The main conclusion from our model is that it is unlikely that the relationship between education and health will be constant over the life cycle and that education is likely to have little effect on health at younger ages when there is little depreciation of the health stock. We also present an extensive empirical analysis documenting the association between education and health over the life cycle. Results of our analysis suggest that in terms of mortality, education has little effect until age 60, but then lowers the hazard rate of death. For measures of morbidity, education has an effect at most ages between 45 and 60, but after age 60 has apparently little effect most likely due to selective mortality. In addition, most of the apparent beneficial effect of education stems from obtaining a high school degree or more. It is the health and mortality of lowest education group—those with less than a high school degree—that diverges from the health and mortality of other education groups. Finally, we find that the educational differences in health have become larger for more recent birth cohorts.     

Bearing and transcending suffering with nature and the world: a humanistic account

To conceptualise moral education as ‘living and learning to bear suffering’ offers a humanistic vision for choices people make in the face of drastic threats to their existence. This essay proposes that bearing and transcending suffering—part of the human narrative—helps human beings to realise their ethical potential. Grounded in Eastern and Western metaphysics and ethics, I assess the human condition brought about by the 2008 earthquake disaster in China—in an attempt to come to terms with fundamental philosophical questions of existence and human values. While raising questions about how human beings are intrinsically interrelated to Nature and the world, this account is linked by a thread of humanism encompassing three important values (caring, responsibility and free spirit). I conclude by suggesting that educating young people for the wisdom of suffering is to cultivate a humanistic morality. Ethical implications for ecology and moral education are considered.     

高职院校心理健康教育的现状及改进策略

高职生的心理健康问题给高职院校的心理健康教育带来了严峻的挑战。本文综述了我国高职院校心理健康教育工作的现状,针对性地提出了高职院校心理健康教育的策略和方法,主要包括构建和谐的校园环境,提高心理健康教育课程的效果,全面心理咨询和针对性的专题教育相结合,建立网络心理健康教育平台,引导学生进行自我教育。最后,论述了完善心理健康教育的保障机制。     

心理健康教育与"五育"关系探析

心理健康教育是以提高心理健康水平为基础,培养学生心理素质为目标,开发心理潜能为宗旨的教育活动。加强心理健康教育与全面发展培养体系的融合,必须厘清心理健康教育与德智体美劳"五育"关系。德育是心理健康教育的价值导向,智育是心理健康教育的前提条件,体育是心理健康教育的体质基础,美育是心理健康教育的基本内涵,劳动教育是心理健康教育的重要途径。无论是哪种形式的教育,都是按照教育规律对人心理层面以道德、认知、情感、意志等组成的内在系统的发展、维持和修护。心理健康教育与五育重拳齐发、双向建构,是铸造新时代大格局教育,实施教育创新的一种重要探索和有益尝试。     

Contra Aquam Remigare*: Reimagining Humanistic Paideia Through Comparative-Historical Analysis of Education

This article attempts a reading of Andreas M. Kazamias’s work and method as a persistent and firmly grounded attempt to “go against the tide” of an empirical/instrumentalist comparative education and toward a “modernist episteme.” Kazamias has been explicitly critical of the social-scientific-cum-positivist comparative education, while at the same time acknowledging the limitations of the traditional historical-philosophical-humanistic approach. His “revisionist” comparative-historical analysis seeks to combine history with social science toward an “anthropocentric” comparative education, “concerned with the great problems—political, social but also ethical—which ‘mankind’ faces.” Consistent with his rejection of instrumental/“techno-scientific” approaches to comparative education, Kazamias argues for a promethean humanistic education (i.e., paideia, liberal education, culture générale, bildung) cultivating the soul and the mind, aiming at both the Platonic/Socratic psyche and the Aristotelian phronesis.     

基于网络不确定性背景下的青少年网络伦理建构

网络伦理问题的提出揭示了对网络技术的＂双刃剑＂所引发的伦理关注。网络技术在造福人类的同时,也撞击了传统的伦理壁垒,给青少年带来了消极和负面的冲击,因此要采取积极有效的措施,加强网德教育,健全法规制度,强化网络的监督与管理,构建规范的网络伦理,引导青少年健康成长。     

Intellectual Doping and Pharmaceutical Cognitive Enhancement in Education: Some Ethical Questions

The main aim of this paper is to discuss some moral implications of cognitive doping in education. In this context, the term ‘cognitive doping’ refers to the use of cognitive enhancing drugs—such as Ritalin—among students in order to improve their cognitive functions and educational performance on college exams. Cognitive doping raises not only the question of its health consequences and its legal regulation, but also the ethical questions concerning the moral difference between medical treating and enhancing humans, on the one hand, and the fairness of educational examination results, on the other. Such doping, which is similar to the doping in sports, gives an unfair advantage to students who use cognitive enhancing drugs over those who do not. However, the key question is not how to ensure equal access to the enhancing drugs, but rather whether their use for educational purposes is right. Therefore, this question would remain even if all students had equal access to such drugs and the willingness to use them.     

中职学生心理健康影响因素及改善对策探究

心理健康教育作为素质教育的一个重要方面,受到越来越多的教育界、心理学界等方面专家和一线教育工作者的重视.中职学校学生的心理健康状况,与学生的学习积极性、教师的教学、学校的发展等各方面都有着紧密的联系.文章通过分析中职学校学生心理健康问题的表现,探讨影响中职学生心理健康的因素,提出解决中职学生心理健康问题的对策:树立正确...     

小学双语教师心理健康状况调查研究

文章使用SCL——90量表,调查小学双语教师心理健康状况,分析原因,提出对他们进行心理健康教育的具体措施。     

论柏拉图伦理教育思想的现代意义

柏拉图在《理想国》中阐述了其伦理教育的目的观、内容观和方法观,反映了其在当时社会变革时期对理想社会的追求。柏拉图的这些伦理教育思想,对同样处在变革时期的我国学校道德教育实践和形成和谐的社会与正义的人,具有重要的现代意义。这种现代意义,集中体现在其伦理教育起点对当今伦理教育的启发性、伦理教育权威思想在当今伦理教育中的可参照性、伦理教育策略在当今伦理教育实践中的可借鉴性等方面。     

略论信息时代高校的德育教育

信息时代的来临和网络技术的迅速发展,使高校德育教育面临着严峻的挑战,同时也提供了难得的发展机遇.高校德育教育应充分利用现有网络的技术优势,转换德育教育理念,创新德育教育方法,丰富德育教育内容,使德育教育迈上新台阶.     

Moral relations in encounters with nature

The overall aim of this article is to develop in-depth knowledge about the connection between outdoor experiences and moral attitudes towards nature. The study focuses on processes in which moral relations are at stake in encounters between students and nature. The purpose is to identify such events, describe their specific circumstances and clarify how moral relations are established in these events. The empirical material consists of video-recordings of activities in three different outdoor education practices. In order to identify and categorise moral situations, an analytical tool called the ethical tendency is used. This tool is based on Wittgenstein’s language game method. The findings show that in the investigated outdoor education practices, moral relations towards nature are established in several different ways. The article concludes with four educational implications: responsibility when dealing with moral reactions; bringing ethical questions to the fore; different educational conditions create different encounters with nature; and the consequences of different language games.