Whole Students for a Whole World: Catching Integrity in the Social Conscience Classroom (original) (raw)
Related papers
Roles of the Social Conscience Teacher: A Literature Review
This is the first entry of a two-part series about the roles that teachers play in facilitating development of students’ social conscience. Both come directly from my dissertation. The first entry is an excerpt from the literature review, while the second describes my research findings. While I considered attempting to merge the two into a “definitive” statement, I believe that both the review and the findings accurately describe aspects of my own teaching practice and those that I interviewed for my research. I also feel it is best to include both entries as excerpts from my dissertation rather than risking over-simplification in pursuit of some imagined larger synthesis. Rather, additional research is needed to further refine these ideas.
Helping students to see for themselves that ethics matters
2013
The immediacy and anonymity of information access has added a new dimension to the idea of ‘being ethical’. How can ethics educators deal with the challenge of new technology? This study examines the concepts of moral sensitivity and empathy and sees the development of these concepts as key to moral education. Conclusions are that class debates improved levels of moral sensitivity, which, in some cases, were instrumental in bringing about attitudinal and behavioural change. Such an approach to ethics education should tend to foster integrity, which addresses many of the special challenges of being ethical in the information age. Please email Suzy for author version of paper.
Moral Education in the Classroom a Lived Experiment
Expositions: An Interdisciplinary Study in the Humanities, 2020
]t is perhaps the principal task of the political and moral theorist to enable rational agents to learn what they need to learn from the social and cultural tradition that they inherit, while becoming able to put in question that particular tradition's distortions and errors and so, often enough, engaging in a quarrel with some dominant forms of their own political moral culture. 1 What would a course on ethics look like if it took into account Alasdair MacIntyre's concerns about actually teaching students ethical practices? How could professors induct students into practices that prompt both reflection on their cultural formation and self-knowledge of the ways they have been formed by it? According to MacIntyre, such elements are prerequisites for an adequate moral education. His criticism of what he terms "Morality" includes the claim that most courses don't even try to teach the right things. He charges that academic teaching has little if anything to do with character formation, whereas thick practices can transform lives in ways mere argument can never do. 2 Even those of us who appreciate his arguments and agree with his criticisms, however, may find implementing more adequate forms of ethical instruction in the university classroom a tall order.
Building a Sustaining Classroom Climate for Purposeful Ethical Citizenship
International Research Handbook on Values Education and Student Wellbeing, 2010
In an age and society where children and adolescents receive decreasing support for building good lives, best practice for fostering optimal moral character needs to be extended in the classroom beyond mastery learning and positive caring climates. A sustaining classroom climate provides more than a good learning environment or caring classroom. A sustaining classroom climate provides as much as possible the type of environment under which human mammals thrive. It fosters students' sense of positive purpose, as individuals and as a group, and a peaceful moral citizenship. It is characterized by collaborative leadership, community fellowship, democratic practice, and enhancement of human potential. In Triune Ethics theory terms, students learn to foster the engagement and imagination ethics while minimizing the self-centric security ethic. In sustaining classrooms, students learn skills for individual flourishing and enabling community flourishing.
In this quasi-experimental study, we investigated two elements of ethics education: (1) how participating in ethics education influenced science and engineering graduate students' views of their roles in society, and (2) what students found most valuable and relevant. Participants were 98 graduate science and engineering students. Qualitative analysis indicated that the most prevalent responses reflected a desire to benefit society. Duty-based responses were more prevalent in pretest than in posttest responses. Participants in experimental conditions indicated more complicated notions of their societal roles than control participants. Participants emphasized the value of class discussions for increasing their awareness of issues, alternative views, and their own positions. Results are interpreted using the engaged communication in the disciplines framework with practical implications for educators.
Integrity in and Beyond Contemporary Higher Education: What Does it Mean to University Students?
Frontiers in Psychology, 2016
Research has focused on academic integrity in terms of students' conduct in relation to university rules and procedures, whereas fewer studies examine student integrity more broadly. Of particular interest is whether students in higher education today conceptualize integrity as comprising such broader attributes as personal and social responsibility. We collected and analyzed qualitative responses from 127 students at the National University of Singapore to understand how they define integrity in their lives as students, and how they envisage integrity would be demonstrated in their lives after university. Consistent with the current literature, our data showed that integrity was predominantly taken as "not plagiarizing (in school)/giving appropriate credit when credit is due (in the workplace)", "not cheating", and "completing tasks independently". The survey, though, also revealed further perceptions such as, in a university context, "not manipulating data (e.g., scientific integrity)", "being honest with others", "group work commitments", "conscience/moral ethics/holding true to one's beliefs", "being honest with oneself", "upholding a strong work ethic", "going against conventions", and "reporting others", as well as, in a workplace context, "power and responsibility and its implications", "professionalism", and "representing or being loyal to an organization". The findings suggest that some students see the notion of integrity extending beyond good academic conduct. It is worthwhile to (re)think more broadly what (else) integrity means, discover the gaps in our students' understanding of integrity, and consider how best we can teach integrity to prepare students for future challenges to integrity and ethical dilemmas.
Ethical Education in Schools: Learning to Engage with Others
Ethical Education: Towards an Ecology of Human Development, 2019
Ethical education should help students become more sensitive to the perspectives and experiences of others. However, the field is dominated by the teaching of moral values as a subject-matter, or by the fostering of character traits in students, or by moral reasoning. This book proposes an alternative to these limited moralistic approaches. It places human relationships at the core of ethical education, in its understanding of both ethics and education. With contributions from renowned international scholars, this approach is laid out in three parts. Part I develops the underlying theory of ethics and education; Part II focuses on the relevant pedagogical principles, and Part III provides illustrations of emergent innovative ethical educational practices in worldwide schools. Against a backdrop of divisiveness and apathy, the innovative practices described in this book show how a new vision for ethical education might be centred around caring for students' well-being.
2016
U-M students visit community-based organizations in Detroit on a weekly basis to work on projects aimed at improving the wellbeing of children and their families, such as tutoring youth in afterschool programs. Their site visits are supplemented by relevant readings, class discussions and written reflections on topics such as developmental psychology, poverty, and education, which connect what they are learning in class to what they experience in the field. 1 U-M students with social identities that have historically experienced conflict and differential status come together to engage in critical self-reflection and purposeful dialogue to better understand each other's point of view and solve problems regarding race relations. 2 Using case studies, U-M students learn about the multiple and often competing viewpoints of stakeholders in land management. They attend a local planning commission meeting and reflect on the economic, scientific, and moral implications of various landuse proposals. 3
BUILDING A CULTURE OF INTEGRITY IN THE CLASSROOM.pdf
Among other skills that should be possessed by a teacher is the organization of work in the classroom in which there is cooperation between the entities represented in it. He is obliged to provide a friendly and working atmosphere, democratic environment in which all jointly create the rules in the classroom, behave responsibly and show mutual respect. Democratic classroom is a place of opportunity and self-initiative among students, willingness and authority, freedom of thought and speech, respect for differences and similarities and the integrity of the person. The integrity is manifested in willingness to adhere to the values that are most important in life. Integrity is the foundation of character. It is a choice of values and resolution to live by those values that form the character and personality. And it is integrity that enhances all other human values. The quality of the person is determined by how well she lives up to the values that are most important. Integrity is the quality that locks in the values and causes to live consistent with them. The emphasis in this paper will be placed precisely on building a culture of integrity in the classroom. It should also be understood as an integral part of the democratic classroom and something that shouldn't be neglected.