Public Trust and Service: Honoring the Heart of Professional Education

• In Event: 52.083 - Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: 52.083-10 - From Challenges to Opportunities: Pedagogical Principles for the Next Generation of Educating Professionals

Abstract

Public trust and service are at the heart of traditional definitions of the professions. Yet broader socio-economic changes and pressures threaten that core. Students need help in understanding the social responsibility associated with professional rights and privileges.
Challenge
Professionals provide technical expertise, must meet peer-reviewed standards, and are granted the authority to make autonomous judgments under conditions of uncertainty that require balancing competing interests or principles (Wilson et al., 2013). In doing so, they must also demonstrate respect, responsibility, personal commitment, and behave in a manner befitting their profession (Wilson et al., 2013). This second set of competencies is intimately tied to maintaining public trust and serving the public – the key traditional responsibilities that accompany the privileges and status that professionals enjoy. This paper draws on an analysis of professional codes of practice and statements of ethics from professional societies and accreditation bodies (e.g. in medicine, engineering, accounting and law), which repeatedly refer to the centrality of maintaining the public trust, to meeting public expectations, and to protecting and serving the public interest.
Yet, with increasing marketization (Sandel, 2012), traditional altruistic values that underpin the professions are under threat. In medicine in the US, for example, the financing of healthcare creates dissonance with physician virtues such as compassion and social justice (Doukas et al., 2015). In higher education, marketization has led to neglect of the public good that higher education confers (McMahon, 2009). There is a society-wide retreat from “the commons” (Parks, 2000) – an appreciation of shared public good that underpins professionals’ traditional sense of purpose, commitment and calling. It follows that student understanding of what underlies professionalism (even at a graduate level) is also lacking (Wilson, et al., 2013).
Opportunity
Educators in the professions hold the future in their hands – the future of their students, their profession, and the society that places its trust in professionals. Colby and colleagues (2003) argue that “the development of values and goals, moral and civic identity, and a sense of efficacy, hope and compassion is even more dependent on active engagement, complex and authentic contexts, social exchange, regular practice, and informative feedback than in the development of more traditional dimensions of academic understanding.”

Professional formation happens – whether planned or unplanned (Hafferty, 1998) – as students are building their professional identities and grappling with the particular ethical challenges associated with their professional practice. As such, teaching, curriculum, and the culture of professional schools need to attend to professional formation. Doing so requires educational leadership that supports students’ holistic development (Quinlan, 2014); the willingness to engage directly with students on questions of ethics; the courage to teach in ways that address purpose, public good and service (Parks, 2000); and education based on sound educational principles (Colby et al, 2003) and a theory of moral action and motivation (Damon & Colby, 2015).
Key principle
Professional education needs to be rooted in an understanding of the public good. We need to cultivate students’ sense of social responsibility and professional purpose in the context of a changing society.

Author

• Kathleen M. Quinlan, University of Kent