Ethical Dimensions of Secondary School Teachers' Curriculum Practices

• In Event: Advances in the Assessment of Moral Growth and Issues in the Moral Dimensions of Teaching

Abstract

The qualitative study reported in this paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of curriculum and its interpretation and implementation by secondary school teachers. It explores what teachers do to respond to a curriculum that increasingly adopts a values-laden perspective (e.g., social justice education, critical literacy) that establishes expectations for students to examine issues and make evaluative judgments about what they consider good/bad, right/wrong, true/false, objective/biased. Such curricular and pedagogical aims have embedded and overt implications in an ethical sense. The study investigates how teachers realize such aims in their daily practice, and probes their awareness of ethical and ideological principles embedded in the curriculum as well as their own orientations to enacting the curriculum and their intended influence on students.

Authors

• Elizabeth Campbell, OISE/University of Toronto

• David Bussell, OISE/University of Toronto

• Gillian Rosenberg, OISE/University of Toronto