Ethical Reflections on Becoming Teachers

• In Event: Moral Development and Education: Gender, Culture, Moral Motivation, and Judgment

Abstract

This study explores ethical reflections on becoming teachers developed in a culminating graduate course on reflection and reflective practice. These extensive narratives, written by 36 newly certified secondary educators, focused on their student teaching experiences. Coded themes reveal these new teachers’ awareness of ethical decisions that permeate teaching and schooling, their belief in the need for continual critical reflection on their own values, and their deliberations about how they negotiated and learned from ethical dilemmas. The reflections also reveal the teachers’ perceptions of their expanding ethical systems as a consequence of their new learning from graduate studies and teaching experiences. Analysis of narratives includes consideration of adult moral development as well as characterization of forms of reflective writing.

Author

• Pamela Bolotin Joseph, University of Washington - Bothell