Teachers' Ethical Meaning-Making: Navigating Four Continua of Tensions

• In Event: Professional Ethics for Future Teachers: Toward a Common Vision

Abstract

Purpose
This study sought to understand how teachers’ make meaning of their ethical decisions and to determine how teachers describe and navigate ethical tensions they identify in their daily work.

Perspectives
The National Education Association identified the following as top reasons for becoming a teacher: 1) a desire to work with young people, 2) the value or significance of education in society, 3) interest in a subject-matter field, and 4) the influence of a teacher in elementary or secondary school (The Status of the American Public School Teacher survey, 2001). Many agree that teaching includes a moral set of responsibilities (Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik; 1990). As Barrett and colleagues (2012) posited, professional ethics serve three essential purposes: to ensure high professional standards, to protect students, and to guide teachers in their decision-making.

Methods and Data Sources
Through teacher interviews and the recording of critical incidents (Tripp, 2012) teachers’ reflections upon seemingly mundane daily events were encapsulated. Gilligan’s Listening Guide (1982) was utilized in order to consider the relational, social and cultural frameworks that may affect what is either spoken by participants or heard by the researcher.

Results
Overall findings suggested that teachers grapple with ethically complex situations primarily by weighing what is best for students within the competing tensions represented on four continua. To summarize, the first continuum represents, at one end, a professional orientation of ethics and, at the other end, a more personal moral orientation that informed ethical practice. The second continuum signifies how teachers made sense of students’ short-term versus long-term development and growth regarding students’ academic learning, emotional, interpersonal, and developmental needs. The third continuum is one in which teachers felt torn between honoring the needs of an individual student versus the pull towards the needs of the greater community. The fourth continuum represents how these teachers navigated the desire to contribute toward ideal outcomes in any given situation versus avoiding the worst-case scenarios. Rarely are the ethical dilemmas that teachers face only represented on one continuum, but rather these continua are often overlapping and represent a dynamic interplay of tensions.

Scholarly significance
The results of this study reveal clearer and more nuanced insights into the ways in which teachers make sense of their ethical practice. This can be characterized as a care-based approach in which teachers honor the needs of their students while also taking into account competing priorities, consistent with feminist scholars (e.g. Gilligan, 1982; Noddings, 1984, 1988; Code, 1991) who articulated that humans’ decisions are guided by relationships, rather than focusing on ethics as a matter of justice and fairness in which people follow universal rules (Kohlberg, 1981).

Author

• Charity M. Dacey, Felician University