Demoralization and the Role of Personal and Professional Integrity in the Lives of Teachers

• In Event: Demoralization and Schizophrenia: What Lives Should Teacher Education Prepare Candidates For?

Abstract

Teacher education can preserve the practice of teaching by creating spaces to discuss the moral dimensions of teaching in non-ideal contexts. I have argued that a loss of integrity in teaching practices corrodes the lives of teachers and the practice of teaching (Santoro, in press). Preserving the practice of teaching requires listening to and sustaining conversations with educators about what is and is not teaching and what it means to be and to not be a teacher. These conversations and voices are noticeably absent in the din of accountability and productivity. Teacher education can prepare pre-service students for their lives as teachers by helping them to recognize the challenges in accessing the moral rewards of the work and to cultivate communities that are committed to pursuing integrity in teaching in the face of these challenges.

Using the concept of demoralization (Santoro, 2011a), I show that certain forms of dissatisfaction in the lives of teachers occur because teachers feel that they can no longer access the moral rewards of their work. Likewise, I rely on Dewey’s (1909) definition of a moral situation as an “incompatibility of ends” (p. 207) to discuss how teachers find themselves in a bind when asked to engage in practices that violate their vision of good teaching, their commitment to care for their students and/or how they see themselves as persons. At stake in moral situations is not simply what should be done, but who the teacher is – as a teacher and as a person. It is in the nexus of personal integrity, professional integrity, and the integrity of teaching that teachers may experience the personal and professional satisfaction of “good work” (Santoro, 2011b).

This philosophical analysis draws on interviews with 13 experienced teachers from high-poverty schools who left work they loved. Themes of isolation, guilt and shame pervade their discourse. Rather than viewing these as personalized complaints, they signal moral discourse on a moral practice. Demoralization may result from a lack of professional community in which teachers’ moral concerns are recognized as moral. Teacher education, from pre-service to in-service, can be a place where discussions about moral situations in teaching can be preserved. These discussions create opportunities for the cultivation of professional moral community or “craft conscience” (Green, 1999) where concerns of personal integrity, professional integrity, and the integrity of teaching can be addressed collectively.

Discussions of the moral work of teaching can be embedded within conflicted contexts. Between the utopian vision of teaching as an idyllic calling and the dystopian perspective that construes teachers as low-level functionaries remains space to consider the moral dimensions of teaching and the lives of teachers in relation to pedagogical policy demands. Considering the moral dimensions of teaching need not entail abandoning the context of the lives of teachers, but engaging in conversations about how to live and teach with integrity in those contexts and, if possible, to work collectively to transform them.

Author

• Doris A. Santoro, Bowdoin College