Connecting moral development with critical pedagogy: A reply to Winston Thompson

ABSTRACT

Winston C. Thompson’s review of Moral Education for Social Justice by Larry Nucci and Robyn Ilten-Gee accurately captures the effort to integrate critical pedagogy with domain-based moral education. A core element is student participation in domain-based discourse entailing responsive engagement that transcends the cognitive activity of individuals. Those discussions may lead to action projects (praxis). Replying to Thompson’s review, Nucci and Ilten-Gee address potential problems that may arise from student resistance and from objections of conservatives who may view attention to social justice as political indoctrination. They conclude that moral education that does not attend to social justice suffers from incoherence.

KEYWORDS:

• Domain-based moral education
• social justice
• critical pedagogy
• social cognitive domain theory
• responsive engagement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Larry Nucci

Larry Nucci is Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the recipient of the Association for Moral Education Kuhmerker Career Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research and Practice in Moral Education.

Robyn Ilten-Gee

Robyn Ilten-Gee is Assistant Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. She received her PhD from the Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley. She worked as a producer and education reporter at YR Media (formerly Youth Radio). Her research examines the overlap between critical pedagogy and moral development.