The Moral Vacuum in Swedish Teachers’ Language of Values Education

• In Event: The Moral Vacuum in Teacher Education: International Perspectives on Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

The moral is constantly present and embedded in everyday school life. Teachers have to consider the ethical complexity of their work and the moral impact they have on their students (e.g., Campbell, 2003, 2004; Colnerud, 1997, 2006; Jackson, Boostrom, & Hansen, 1993; Sanger & Osguthorpe, 2005; Shapira-Lishchinsky, 2009, 2011; Thornberg, 2006, 2009). In Sweden, the concept of values education has been adopted to refer to all kinds of activities in schools in which teachers mediate, teach, or promote students’ learning and development in values and morality. As an educational science and research field, values education includes a domain overlap of moral philosophy, moral psychology, and educational theory and research (cf., Halstead & Pike, 2006; Lovat, Toomey, & Clement, 2010; Nucci & Narvaez, 2008).

Sanger and Osguthorpe (2005, 2009) have proposed the Moral Work of Teaching (MWT) framework as a tool for analyzing approaches to moral education. The framework consists of a set of categories: (a) psychological assumptions about moral psychology, development and learning, (b) moral assumptions (metaethical and normative assumptions), (c) educational assumptions about the aims, nature and scope of teaching and education, and (d) contingent factors (personal, historical, social, political, and institutional).

The purpose of this study was to examine Swedish teachers’ beliefs and assumptions about values education using the MWT framework to shed light on the nature of the moral vacuum in my country. Qualitative interview data from two previous studies have been analyzed by methods from grounded theory (e.g., Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967), informed by MWT and values education literature (cf., Thornberg, 2012). The findings revealed a lack of professional knowledge of the multi-disciplinary fields of values education. Instead, they consistently used an everyday language. Their moral assumptions behind values education tended to be taken-for-granted rules and personal traits in a blurred mix. Implicit, underdeveloped, and mixed versions of deontological and virtue ethics emerged. Moral and conventional rules were often conflated (cf., Nucci, 2001). Instead of metaethical reasoning, the teachers simply referred to own childhood, common-sense, personal worldviews, emotions, and other personal references as sources. Overall, informed moral language and a critical stance were missing.

Teachers’ psychological assumptions of morality were much about learning and following rules by observing others and listening to authorities. Good character or personal traits were assumed to be developed by the habits of following rules. Their main educational assumptions behind values education were (a) being a role model as a teacher, (b) working with rules, and (c) intervening when transgressions happen in everyday school life.

Values education was mostly represented as an ongoing informal curriculum often in conflict with classroom teaching of school subjects. This artificial distinction expressed by teachers reflects a national curriculum policy discourse in Sweden (teaching knowledge vs. teaching values). This discourse is explored as one among many possible sources of the moral vacuum in teacher education in Sweden, laying the groundwork for comparative analysis in our discussion for this symposium.

Author

• Robert Thornberg, Linköping University