CRITICAL THINKING

Critical Thinking



1. Identify

Consequently, no comparative studies between different groups of teachers and their way of handling ethical demands have been performed. Teaching involves ethical decisions since teachers are dealing with young people in a position of dependency, for whom they are responsible and who they are educating. Teaching is a complicated and demanding job. Its complexity stems from a variety of tasks and contacts.

Aim and Questions Dealt with in the Study

Studies of moral or ethical issues can be either normative or descriptive. A normative statement prescribes how something ought to be. A descriptive statement describes--as far as possible--how something is. Durham (1974) stated that moral reality like all reality can be studied from these two points of view. It can be explored and evaluated. This study endeavors to explore aspects of professional ethics in teaching, not to evaluate it.

The aim of studying professional ethics in teaching is to find out how teachers perceive ethical questions and ethical conflicts in their work and how ethical dimensions in teaching can be described and understood. The main aim is to depict ethics in teaching practice as reported by the teachers themselves. This involves attempting to put daily moral events into words in order to make them both discernible and possible to describe and understand.

Structural context of school as an institution.

This is done in order to make it possible to describe the specific conditions important to the origin of both teachers' ethical conflicts and the alternative decisions they identify and choose.

With these objectives as a basis a number of specific questions can be formulated:

• What professional ethical conflicts do teachers experience and deal with in their work?

• What are the characteristics of these conflicts?

• Which of the different norms conflict?

• In what situations do they occur?

• In what specific conditions and circumstances do the conflicts arise?

2. Research

Teacher ethics have been discussed in educational research since the mid-1980s. However, since moral phenomena are usually discussed in the context of educational or moral philosophy, there are few examples of empirical studies. The existing empirical research on the ethics of teaching contains some relevant results (Jackson, Boston, & Hansen, 1993; Campbell, 1993; Osier, 1989; Berge, 1993). From these studies, one may conclude that teachers are not aware of the moral impact of their actions (Jackson, Boston, & Hansen, 1993) and that, by compromising their own ideals, they run the risk of suspending their sense of moral responsibility (Campbell, 1993). Furthermore, teachers vary in their solutions of moral conflicts with respect to the degree of responsibility and involvement of others (Osier, 1989) and teacher education has, to a lesser extent, contributed to the development of teachers' ethical awareness (Berge, 1993).

In educational philosophy, some researchers are concerned about the moral dimensions of teaching, arguing that attention should be paid to the need to develop teachers' ethical competence.

The first argument in this discussion focuses on the power and responsibilities teachers have in relation to pupils and the risk of using this power in a manipulative ...