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Article Excerpt
If there is a truism in education, it is that good teaching requires a teacher to be knowledgeable in content, skilled in method, and virtuous in disposition and character. The first two stipulations are most often and easily connected to student learning; it is readily accepted that a deep understanding of subject matter and an ability to effectively employ methods to convey that subject matter might increase a student's opportunity to learn. Thus, we want teachers to be experts in their content areas, and we want them to be able to convey that content in ways that make it accessible to students. But why do we want teachers to be of good disposition and moral character? Presumably, we want teachers to be virtuous for reasons that extend beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic--we want them to be of virtuous disposition because they inescapably influence the moral development of the children in their charge. In other words, a purported reason for wanting teachers of good disposition and moral character in the classroom is that teachers act as moral exemplars and models, which in turn is believed to have a direct effect on the moral development of students.
This presumption of a relationship between the moral dispositions of teachers and the moral development of students is one rationale for attending to dispositions in teacher preparation programs, but it does little to quell the debate swirling around the definition of dispositions, their potential for development in teacher preparation, and the best methods of assessing them in teacher candidates. In fact, such a rationale has potential to create even more controversy by bringing issues of moral education and moral development to bear on considerations of teacher candidate quality. Furthermore, although it might be the case that there is a strong relationship between the moral dispositions of a teacher and the moral development of a student, it might also be the case that the relationship is a weak one or even nonexistent, that the moral qualities of a teacher do not have quite their assumed impact on the development of similar qualities in students. Given the potential for additional controversy and the possible indeterminacy of such a relationship (see Osguthorpe, 2009), this article builds on the notion that there are reasons for wanting teachers of good disposition and moral character that transcend any connection to the moral development of students--all in an effort to clarify the priority placed on dispositions in the preparation of teachers.
Thus, the purpose of this article is to put forward a more robust rationale for wanting teachers of good disposition and moral character, one that is rooted in the claim that good dispositions are immanent in good teaching-connecting dispositions to the activities of teaching and learning and moving them away from a narrow focus on moral development. This rationale is derived from a consideration of three provocative questions that bring important issues to bear on the dispositions debate: (a) Why do we want teachers of good disposition and moral character? (b) How morally good does a teacher need to be? and (c) What if a teacher is of poor moral character or disposition? In the first section of the article, I provide some background for the current inquiry as it pertains to the controversy surrounding dispositions and teacher education. The purpose of this section is to show how attention to moral dispositions in teacher education has often been closely connected to the moral development of students.
In the remaining sections, I examine each of the questions described above with special consideration for the possibility that the putative relationship between the moral dispositions of teachers and the moral development of students is nonexistent. The purpose of these sections is to unearth some of the most commonly held assumptions regarding the moral character and dispositions of teachers and to suggest alternative reasons for placing an emphasis on dispositions in teacher preparation. The questions I raise have particular relevance to the preparation of preservice teachers, and in conclusion, I explore the applications of these questions (and subsequent discussion) for the practice of teacher education. These applications point to different ways that teacher preparation programs might attend to the moral character of teacher candidates, and they also suggest different reasons for wanting teachers of good disposition and moral character in the first place. The purpose of this final section is to provide possible directions for future practice and research.
Conceptual Framework
My point of entry into this article is via the Manner in Teaching Project (MTP), a philosophical and empirical study aimed at understanding how the expression of moral character traits and dispositions (manner) is made manifest in classroom teaching. (1) The MTP research team was particularly interested in how teacher manner (the expression of virtuous traits and dispositions) is made visible in classrooms and what effect manner has on moral development. As Richardson and Fenstermacher (2001) state, "We wanted to know whether teachers did in fact posses such traits, how they displayed them in their conduct, and what influence they might have on students" (p. 632). It was assumed that if teachers possessed such traits, then the research team stood a good chance of observing them in teachers' actions. A particularly Aristotelian perspective on moral development provided the conceptual frame for the MTP inquiry, wherein the young acquire virtue by being around virtuous people (see Aristotle, 2000, translation; Dearden, Hirst, & Peters, 1972; Ryle, 1972). That is, virtue is not "taught"--at least not in the way that mathematics or biology is taught. Instead, virtue is "caught" or "picked up" by interacting with those who seemingly possess it through habituation.
Thus, MTP researchers entered schools and classrooms with Aristotelian-colored lenses--expecting to see virtues expressed by teachers and subsequently picked up by students. For example, Richardson and Fenstermacher (2001) initially believed that "if teachers were to contribute to the moral and intellectual development of their students, the teachers themselves had to possess and exhibit the moral and intellectual traits they sought for their students" (p. 632). The emphasis of the study was on detecting the exhibition or display of virtuous character traits and understanding how teachers employed these traits in the course of everyday instruction. It also relied heavily on the assumption that once displayed, these virtues were "caught" by students in the classroom.
A similar theoretical framework guides the argument in this article because this same language of virtue and this conception of moral development often frame discussion of dispositions and the reasons that are put forth in the literature for wanting teachers of good disposition and moral character. Use of the term moral, then, in this article assumes a normative sense of morality, in that it refers to what is "morally good" rather than what is, more broadly, morally salient (Sanger, 2003). In addition, the following assumptions are made about dispositions and moral development: (a) Moral dispositions are a developed feature of what a teacher is and does, what she already has, as opposed to what she is coming into, and (b) moral development refers to what happens to a student, what a student is becoming in a moral sense (see Burnyeat, 1980). Thus, as it modifies character and development, the term moral in this article implies character or development over time that is consistent with what is morally good or virtuous.
Regarding dispositions, important distinctions can be made between what is, for example, virtuous or right (see Sockett, 2006), and these differences would certainly prove analytically useful in furthering our understanding of the questions that guide this inquiry. However, they are not necessarily germane to the primary argument in this article (although certainly pertinent to outgrowths of the argument) because these differences are related more to what makes actions right than to the practical manifestations of each theory:
The two main modern competitors to virtue ethics are utilitarianism and Kantianism. It is important to recognize that these three theories may largely converge in their practical conclusions [italics added]. They may all, for instance, recommend that one be generous, or just. But the reasons that the theories offer differ greatly. According to utilitarianism, what makes actions right is their producing the largest amount of well-being overall. According to Kantianism, what makes actions right is their being in accordance with the law of reason. We might understand Aristotle, and a pure virtue ethics, as claiming that what makes actions right is their being virtuous. (Crisp, 2000, p. xvii)
This article is primarily concerned with the "practical conclusions" of attending to dispositions in teacher preparation. Thus, an attempt is made in this article to employ an inclusive and normative sense of "moral," encompassing that which is considered good, virtuous, caring, right, proper, and so on (see Sockett, 2006, p. 20), but it favors the Aristotelian conception because the roots of the relationship...
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