(Re)searching Ethical Vocabularies: Dialogic Encounters with Virtue Ethics in Education

• In Event: Pushing the Curriculum Boundaries in Authoritarian Educational Times

Abstract

In this paper, we enter a dialogic current (re)conceived in Ying Ma’s 2025 text on the ethical questions of teaching: what is the place of virtue ethics in the contemporary educational landscape? We are two scholar-educators working with different types of students in two transnational contexts: pre-service teachers in Scotland and higher education student affairs educators in the United States. Our paper centers our ongoing dialogue about the place of ethics in the neoliberal academy of the 21st century. We aim to assist students in understanding the purpose of education not as a technocratic instrument, but as a discipline that can allow them to engage with the world in a manner grounded in virtue ethics.

Authors

• Paul William Eaton, University of Alabama

• Gaston Esteban Bacquet, University of Glasgow