Conversing on ethics,morality and education

In philosophical use, ‘ethics’ and ‘moral philosophy’ are more closely synonymous—one deriving from Greek, ethikē and the other from Latin moralis. In typical social science paradigms, there generally prevails a consensual sense of contemporary everyday use of ethics, except where earlier usage sustains discourse in terms of morals—as with moral psychology. This article takes a recent publication in this journal by Patrick Welch to propose a ‘conversation’ between theoretic and empirical approaches to ethics and morals. This is illustrated using works by Joseph Ratzinger to suggest a natural law approach that brings together premises and empirics in ethical and moral discourse and action. This kind of integration helps the discovery and owning of truth that is ‘not of one’s own making’. Such a synthetic approach is especially relevant to raising student identity with ethical/moral issues and in assisting their building of psychological structures and processes that support education in ethical/moral reasoning and action.     

The relationship between teacher’s autonomy support and students’ autonomy and vitality

Abstract

Within education, some teachers’ interpretation of professionalism emphasizes conformity to the perceived norms of collective associations. Unprofessional behaviour, often equated with ‘unethical’ behaviour, is seen by many to be that which threatens solidarity and loyalty to colleagues. Informal norms typified by casual collegial relations as well as more formal attachments to organized unions or teachers’ federations exert a significant influence on individuals’ behaviour within the group. Professional ethics, in this sense, become concerned primarily with how one relates to colleagues rather than how one fulfils moral responsibilities to students. Qualitative findings from interviews with elementary and secondary school teachers suggest that, as a result of an ethic of collegial loyalty, some teachers experience personal moral and ethical dilemmas that they find difficult to resolve. Some respondents acknowledged that this can enable serious situations to be ignored or ‘covered up’. This paper examines some of the tensions and dilemmas experienced by teachers and raises questions about the ethical adequacy of defining professionalism in terms of inter‐colleague behaviour.     

Responding to a Relevance Imperative in School Science and Mathematics: Humanising the Curriculum Through Story

There has been a recent push to reframe curriculum and pedagogy in ways that make school more meaningful and relevant to students’ lives and perceived needs. This ‘relevance imperative’ is evident in contemporary rhetoric surrounding quality education, and particularly in relation to the junior secondary years where student disengagement with schooling continues to abate. This paper explores how teachers translate this imperative into their mathematics and science teaching. Interview data and critical incidents from classroom practice are used to explore how six teachers attempted to make the subject matter meaningful for their students. Four ‘Categories of Meaning Making’ emerged, highlighting key differences in how the nature of science and mathematics content constrained or enabled linkages between content and students’ lifeworlds. While the teachers demonstrated a commitment to humanising the subject at some level, this analysis has shown that expecting teachers to make the curriculum relevant is not unproblematic because the meaning of relevance as a construct is complex, subject-specific, and embedded in understanding the human dimensions of learning, using, and identifying with, content. Through an examination of the construct of relevance and a humanistic turn in mathematics and science literature I argue for an expanded notion of relevance.     

Logics of business education for sustainability

This paper explores various kinds of logics of ‘business education for sustainability’ and how these ‘logics’ position the subject business person, based on eight teachers’ reasoning of their own practices. The concept of logics developed within a discourse theoretical framework is employed to analyse the teachers’ reasoning. The analysis takes its starting point in different approaches to how a business ought to or could take responsibility for sustainable development. Different approaches to business ethical responsibilities, in combination with assumptions about how educational content is legitimised and presupposed purposes of education, are used to construct logics of business education for sustainability. In the paper, the results of this analysis are presented as: the logic of profit-, social- or radical-oriented business education. Our results also show how the different logics position the subject business person differently, as one who adapts to, adds or creates ethical values. The results are first discussed in terms of how environmental and social challenges could be dealt with in the future and secondly, considering the risk of de-subjectification with regard to profit-oriented business education, the implications this may have for the educational quality itself.     

Development and Implementation of Science and Technology Ethics Education Program for Prospective Science Teachers

The purposes of this study were (1) to develop a science and technology (ST) ethics education program for prospective science teachers, (2) to examine the effect of the program on the perceptions of the participants, in terms of their ethics and education concerns, and (3) to evaluate the impact of the program design. The program utilized problem-based learning (PBL) which was performed as an iterative process during two cycles. A total of 23 and 29 prospective teachers in each cycle performed team activities. A PBL-based ST ethics education program for the science classroom setting was effective in enhancing participants’ perceptions of ethics and education in ST. These perceptions motivated prospective science teachers to develop and implement ST ethics education in their future classrooms. The change in the prospective teachers’ perceptions of ethical issues and the need for ethics education was greater when the topic was controversial.     

Forwarding a ‘science-ethics nexus’ to critique and reorient science education pedagogy toward greater social and ecological justice

In this paper, I engage with arguments put forth by Blue Mahy in his article “A speculative-posthumanist examination of the ‘science-ethics nexus’ in Australian secondary schools.” Mahy argues that by using relational posthumanist concepts as a diffractive lens, his critiques of Australian school science standards find the underlying hegemonies of masculine, Euro-Western ideologies that infuse the stance on ethics in science education. He uses a ‘plug in process’ of posthumanist concepts to generate a ‘speculative fiction’. This is a method used to reclaim ethics and science by creating narratives produced by the diffracted projections of posthumanist concepts. In my own research on science teacher education, I explore Mahy's use of diffraction for both critiquing science curriculum and providing projections for future ethical commitments in school science education. I utilize data from my science methods course which is situated in Central California’s agricultural region at a largely Hispanic-Serving Institution.

     

THE TEACHER AND THE PROJECT PRINCIPLE

This article presents an initial exploration of the teaching of ethics by religion teachers in second level schools in Ireland. It is set against the moral issues faced in Irish society and the President's Ethics Initiative. The article examines the difference between the practice of morality and the science of ethics as well as ethical theories and traditions. It provides a brief background to Irish education at second level before turning to the results of the survey. It is the author's view that there is considerable teaching of ethics by religion teachers at second level schools in Ireland.     

Reading,engagement and higher education

ABSTRACT

This article explores the close association between higher education and reading. I draw on the resources of literary studies to illuminate the phenomenon of educational ‘engagement’. I explore the accounts of reading offered in the phenomenological literary theory of Rita Felski and Marielle Macé and extend their ‘stylistics of existence’ into higher education to elaborate engagement’s ‘eventful’ character: it is not in the power of teacher or student to ‘bring about’ engagement. In place of pedagogical ‘method’, I demonstrate how Padraig Hogan’s treatment of education as the ‘courtship of sensibility’ is consistent with this phenomenological treatment of engagement. I am thus able to illustrate how engagement is in tension with instrumental approaches to teaching and learning. I conclude by offering an ethical relation of mutual belonging to subject matter as a corrective to the centrality of ‘knowledge’ in recent attempts to unify the different degrees and objects of engagement.     

Students’ qualification in environmental and sustainability education—epistemic gaps or composites of critical thinking?

In an ‘age of measurement’ where students’ qualification is a hot topic on the political agenda, it is of interest to ask what the function of qualification might implicate in relation to a complex issue as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and what function environmental and sustainability issues serve in science education. This paper deals with how secondary and upper secondary teachers in discussions with colleagues articulate qualification in relation to educational aims of ESD. With inspiration from discourse theory, the teachers’ articulations of qualification are analysed and put in relation to other functions of education (qualification, socialisation and subjectification). The results of this study show three discourses of qualification: scientific reasoning, awareness of complexity and to be critical. The discourse of ‘qualification as to be critical’ is articulated as a composite of differing epistemological views. In this discourse, the teachers undulate between rationalistic epistemological views and postmodern views, in a pragmatic way, to articulate a discourse of critical thinking which serves as a reflecting tool to bring about different ways of valuing issues of sustainability, which reformulates ‘matter of facts’ towards ‘matter of concerns’     

Aristotelian versus virtue ethical character education

This article examines some central aspects of Kristján Kristjánsson’s book, Aristotelian Character Education, beginning with the claim that contemporary virtue ethics provides methodological, ontological, epistemological, and moral foundations for Aristotelian character education. It considers three different formulations of what defines virtue ethics, and suggests that virtue ethical moral theory has steered character educators away from important aspects of Aristotle’s views on character education. It goes on to suggest a broadening of attention to psychology beyond personality and the psychological status of virtues, and it concludes with an examination of Kristjánsson’s understanding of phronesis.     

In‐school Experience Designed to Meet Individual Needs

Current policies at both the state and national levels emphasise the need for increased attention to teaching children with special needs and more extensive school‐based experience in teacher education courses. This paper reports an in‐school experience which was an integral part of an on‐campus subject that focused upon teaching children with special needs. It also addressed a range of issues currently of concern in pre‐service teacher education, including the nature of the in‐school experience, managing the needs of children with learning difficulties in an integrated classroom, overcoming the socialising effect of block practice teaching, reinforcing the relevance of campus‐based subjects, maintaining a balance between the formal teaching expectations and the nurturing roles of teachers, providing teacher educators with recent and relevant in‐school experience, and producing reflective teachers with an understanding and appreciation of the ‘art’ and the ‘science’ of teaching.     

Discussing inclusive education: an inquiry into different interpretations and a search for ethical aspects of inclusion using the capabilities approach

Inclusive education emerged as an idea within United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Special Education Unit and was presented as a new way ahead at the ‘World Conference on Special Needs Education’ in Salamanca in 1994. Since then, it has been on the global agenda as the overriding political objective within education. In spite of this, the international agreement, on an ideological basis, was not initially founded on a common interpretation of the meaning of ‘inclusive education’. However, the Salamanca Statement reflected clearly the idea of overcoming the divide between regular and special education. After 20 years, a vast amount of research and numerous reports and national strategies for implementing inclusive education, there are in these a lack of agreement over a common interpretation of inclusive education. Since 1994, the concept inclusive education has explored the world, so to say, without having landed, and the effort of giving it a clear working definition has thus far been elusive. In order to create a possible common ground for the mutual interpretation of inclusive education, I argue that it is important to see inclusion as an ethical issue. It is crucial to ask again what the purpose of inclusion is. To this end, it is vital to see inclusive education not just as a social and structural matter about how various aspects of a school are organized to meet diverse children’s needs in terms of personnel, pedagogical methods, materials and cultural structures, but also to see inclusive education as an ethical issue. Inclusion impinges on ethical questions because it is for the purpose of something. It conveys something that is valuable. Consequently, I find it pertinent to investigate the ethical aspects of inclusion. I do so in this article, firstly, by juxtaposing different interpretations for inclusive education in the literature. Secondly, I suggest some ethical aspects of inclusion in light of the so-called ‘capabilities’ approach.     

Educating for sexual difference? Muslim teachers' conversations about homosexuality

Homosexuality is widely perceived among many Muslims as a ‘western disease’, a natural outcome of the West's secularity and cultural degeneracy. In spite of the emergence of more liberal attitudes towards sexual differences in modern times, moral issues have not lost their relevance in polemical discourse against homosexuality among many Muslims. The heightened visibility of homosexuals, together with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, lie at the heart of Muslim objection; such movements towards the acceptance of homosexuality are viewed as a concerted and unified homosexual front attempting to squeeze out the hegemonic heterosexual norm. The common response among many Muslims to remedy this perceived ideological corruption is to resort to Islamic doctrine, which prohibits homosexuality and gives merit to heterosexism. This paper reports on some findings from a study by the author which examines how a group of Australian Muslim teachers deliberate on how to include studies on homosexuality as part of a wider dialogue on developing comprehensive sexuality education for Muslim youth. In their deliberations, teachers craft pedagogies which appropriate moral frameworks and expressions of embracing sexual difference. These pedagogical propositions give insight into how teachers generate epistemological, ethical and ontological approaches to critical thought about the subject.     

[Re]considering queer theories and science education

We take Mattias Lundin’s Inviting queer ideas into the science classroom: studying sexual education from a queer perspective as a point of departure to explore some enduring issues related to the use of queer theories to interrogate science education and its practices. We consider the uneasy, polygamous relationship between gay and lesbian studies and queer theories; the border surveillance that characterizes so much of science [education]; the alluring call of binaries and binary thinking; the ‘all’ within the catchcry ‘science for all’; and the need to better engage the fullness of science and the curriculum, in addition to noting silences around diverse sexes, sexualities, and desires. We catalogue some of the challenges that persist in this work, and offer thoughts about how to work with and against them to enact a more just and compelling science education.     

Educating for inquisitiveness: A case against exemplarism for intellectual character education

ABSTRACT

One natural application of Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory (EMT) is found in the context of moral and intellectual character education. Zagzebski discusses this application in her recent book, commenting that ‘exemplars can serve as a guide for moral training’ (p. 129) and endorsing ‘the learning of virtue by imitation’ (p. 129). This theme has been pursued compellingly by authors working at the intersection of virtue ethics and education, contributing to an emerging case for exemplarist-based approaches to character education. I focus on intellectual character education and draw attention to an interesting case in which exemplarism in the classroom may be seen to inhibit, rather than promote, the development of intellectually virtuous character. This is the case of virtuous inquisitiveness.     

A journal and its field: the impact of the Journal of Curriculum Studies

STS (Science, Technology, Society) approaches to science education challenge teachers’ conceptions of the discipline and of pedagogy. This paper deals with the change in teacher thinking necessary to cope with integrated science and STS education. It involves reflection on the moral basis of the subject matter and its teaching. Based on interviews with Canadian and German teachers the authors note that while teacher thinking is rooted in the discipline, and the discipline is the context for teacher reflection about STS approaches, it is also a source of constraint. This constraint raises concerns about the possibility of STS science. The authors consider how integration might enable teachers to overcome the elementarization of school knowledge and work towards helping students cope with the problems of real life.     

Improving Professional Practice through Practice-Based Research: V<Emphasis Type="Italic">a</Emphasis>KE (Values <Emphasis Type="Italic">and</Emphasis> Knowledge Education) in University-Based Teacher Education

Evidence suggests that in the professional education of teachers the moral goals are currently a neglected topic in favor of the subject matter and knowledge. The constructivist instructional approach VaKE (Values and Knowledge Education) addresses this problem by combining the moral and epistemic goals through the discussion of moral dilemmas. The main research question of this practice-based study was whether teacher educators can improve their instructional practice by using VaKE. We describe an empirical study of a teacher educator who used VaKE in order to (i) facilitate pre-service teachers to solve moral conflicts which they are faced with in their workplace learning and to (ii) increase the moral climate in his course. 58 pre-service teachers who formed two classes participated in the study. The study consisted of three research phases: In the first research phase the types of the pre-service teachers’ moral conflicts were examined. In the second research phase the most frequent types of moral conflicts were used as a basis for an explorative quasi-experimental pre-posttest study. This study investigated the effects of VaKE compared to a traditional case-analysis approach with regard to the pre-service teachers’ application of discourse-oriented actions for conflict resolution. In the third phase, a case study method was used comprising a random sample of seven pre-service teachers chosen from each class to investigate the perceived learning climate during the intervention. The results indicate that VaKE provides the possibility to combine the moral and epistemic goals of the professional education of teachers.     

The ‘subject of ethics’ and educational research OR Ethics or politics? Yes please!

This paper outlines a theoretical context for research into ‘the subject of ethics’ in terms of how students come to see themselves as self-reflective actors. I maintain that the ‘subject of ethics’, or ethical subjectivity, has been overlooked as a necessary aspect of creating politically transformative spaces in education. At the heart of egalitarian politics lies a fundamental tension between the equality of voices (or ways of being) and the notion that one way of being or one voice may be deemed more legitimate than another; which in turn puts the equality of beings into question. Building from Michel Foucault’s work regarding ethics and subjectivity, I suggest that a ‘subject of ethics’ can be viewed, in part, as a series of relations of self that form the horizon upon which a subject comes to work on themselves relative to moral codes and power relations. Ethical relations of self can be a useful concept for those interested in educational research that furthers social and ecological justice. In the conclusion of this paper I also discuss the limitations of locating ethics entirely within a constituted human subject.     

Locally grounded,universally binding: The benefit of incorporating traditional care ethics,East and West,into current moral education

In this article, I am suggesting that one effective strategy for revitalizing moral education consists in incorporating classical traditions of care ethics, East and West, which are very much alive in contemporary culture, into sentiments, insights and practices of contemporary care ethics. In so doing we might make moral education much more accessible, natural and friendly to both teachers and students. First, it is associated with down to earth affective and relational elements rather than with highly theoretical philosophical reasoning; second, it is grounded in local cultural traditions that are very much alive in the ‘cultural DNA’ of millions of people in their traditional communities; third, in terms of its moral tenets it is humanistic and universally binding. The desirable outcome, if this model proves tenable, is moral education oriented by care ethics, locally grounded and universally binding.