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Article Excerpt
Much has been written about teacher thinking and knowledge that underpin teacher behaviour in the classroom. Until the 1990s considerably fewer writers considered the moral and ethical dimension of teaching. This article reports on a study that analysed six Languages Other Than English (LOTE) teachers' reports about their teaching. Under the broad category of caring as a moral dimension of teaching, three major moral/ethical concerns were identified: (1) the concern that everyone has a worth, (2) the concern that students should not hurt each other's feelings, and (3) the concern that students should learn to tolerate differences. These concerns enveloped the teachers' stated goals of LOTE teaching and framed their behaviours in the classroom. While the results can only be related to these six LOTE teachers, this study, nevertheless, raises an interesting question of whether teachers of other subjects manifest the moral dimension of their teaching in ways different from those reported here. __
Introduction
Teaching is a complex activity that has interwoven layers of complexities, emanating from the teachers themselves, and compounded by each student, each classroom, each school, each school district and each community. The knowledge base of teachers therefore includes facets of all these complexities, though all such knowledge may not be explicit (Schon, 1983). Knowledge bases discussed by Shulman (1987a) have included those related to subject content, general pedagogy, pedagogical content knowledge contexts and educational ends. Other influences on teacher functioning have also been explored. Amongst these have been the role of teachers' personal biographies (Connelly & Clandinin, 1986), teachers' decision making (Shavelson & Stern, 1981), principles and rules by which they function in classrooms (Elbaz, 1983), aims and goals with which teachers operate (Cooper & McIntyre, 1996; Marland & Osborne, 1990), and beliefs that permeate their teaching (Calderhead, 1996; Pajares, 1992). Borg (2003, p. 81), in writing for a second language audience, has discussed these various sources of knowledge and beliefs--'the unobservable cognitive dimensions of teaching--what teachers know, believe, and think'--as 'teacher cognition', influenced by four sources: schooling, professional coursework, contextual factors and classroom practice.
In the discussion of the bases for teacher action in classrooms by the writers mentioned above and others, considerably less emphasis has been paid to one dimension of beliefs that also influences teacher actions in classrooms: the moral or ethical dimension. For example, Calderhead (1996) discusses teacher beliefs about learners and learning, about subject, about learning to teach, about self and the teaching role and various types of knowledge bases but does not mention the moral element. It seems to be, as Fenstermacher (1990) pointed out, either ignored or forgotten. There is a moral element to our behaviours in our work lives, more in some and rather less in others. The work of teachers, doctors and ministers of religion, for example, may make the moral dimension of their work more salient and would provide some explanation for the types of behaviour that people in these three professions exhibit. To better understand teacher behaviours in the classroom one therefore needs to take into account their moral dimension also, not only the cognitive. It is the argument of this article that the moral/ethical dimension needs to be foregrounded, just as various types of knowledge are in discussions about teachers and their professional behaviour, so that we can develop a fuller understanding of the events that occur in classrooms.
Review of literature
A number of writers have argued for the importance of the moral dimension of teaching. Tom (1984) made the case that teaching was a profoundly moral activity. In a similar vein, in an article responding to Shulman (1987a), Sockett (1987) argued that the occupation of teaching was essentially a moral endeavour and therefore could be discussed in language drawn from the moral realm. This would suggest that a more sociomoral framework should inform thinking about and direct research on teachers and teaching. Such a framework, in which teacher professionalism would be rooted, would contain the 'following four elements: (1) an ideal of service, (2) an epistemology of practice, (3) the professional community and (4) a code of ethics' (Sockett, 1987, p. 217). In his reply to Sockett (1987), Shulman (1987b) acknowledges that there is a moral dimension to teaching that should be included, but he rejects any suggestion that this should be seen as the quintessential feature. Whether it is an essential feature, a prominent feature, or a feature that should be acknowledged more than it has been previously, the moral dimension of teaching had engaged the attention of only a very few researchers in the 1990s (e.g., Higgins, 1995; Jackson, Boostrom, & Hansen, 1993; Johnston, Juhasz, Marken, & Ruiz, 1998). One reason for this might be the problematic nature of the definition of the moral dimension, not the least of which arises out of the fact that one person's morality (at one level) can be another person's prejudice.
Sockett (1993), in an attempt to explicate the moral dimension of teaching, discusses it in terms of a series of virtues. Acknowledging difficulties of definitions in the moral realm, he defines virtue as 'sustainable moral quality of individual human character that is learned' (p. 90) and that clearly entails some form of...
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