The moral work of teaching and teacher education: Preparing and supporting practitioners

The Moral Work of Teaching and Teacher Education: Preparing and Supporting Practitioners, edited by Matthew N. Sanger and Richard D. Osguthorpe, is a compilation of essays highlighting diverse approaches through which teacher educators are preparing teachers for the inherently moral foundation of their work. According to the editors, a primary purpose of the collection is to make ‘an extended case for why teacher educators would do well to attend to [morality] in meaningful ways within their programs’ (p. 3). Not only is the book persuasive in this task, but it also provides a window into how universities and teacher preparation courses are making this important work happen.

Two editor-authored prefatory chapters introduce a central section that consists of nine essays in which both well-established and up-and-coming scholars describe how their own institutions are emphasizing the moral work of teaching in teacher education programs. In each chapter we see how universities from Maine to South Carolina to Illinois to California approach this critical work.

Sanger and Osguthorpe note that most teachers enter the field for altruistic reasons but are often not given the tools to approach their profession through this moral lens. To illustrate how select teacher preparation programs are attempting to do just this, Sanger and Osguthorpe further subdivide their primary section into two thematic frameworks: teaching morally and teaching morality. Teaching morally refers to a teacher acting as a righteous and good person; teaching morality is the act of supporting someone else in becoming righteous and good (p. 4). Though the two are inevitably interconnected, the editors make this distinction to provide a clear lens through which we are able to view a range of perspectives and approaches to this multifaceted topic.

Teaching morally is exemplified in chapter 5 (‘Building an Ethical Self: Awareness of Many Modes of Ethical Thinking and Acting’, by Blumenfeld-Jones with Senneville and Crawford), where the authors describe how ethical systems are taught (e.g. virtue ethics, care ethics and Blumenfeld-Jones’ humility ethics) and how they explicitly support teachers in understanding themselves as ethical thinkers. Conversely, chapter 10 (Nucci’s ‘Reflections on Preparing Preservice Teachers for Moral Education in Urban Settings’) has a distinct focus on teaching morality, with its emphasis on how teachers can integrate social cognitive domain theory and Developmental Discipline into their classrooms.

A particularly appreciated aspect of this collection is that the authors raise and address potential obstacles to implementing the moral work of teaching. For example, in chapter 9, Watson, Benson, Daly, and Pelton describe the Child Development Project as a cornerstone of the teacher preparation curriculum at California State University, Sacramento. Despite competing disciplines and limited time, they were able to prioritize social and ethical development through an integration approach. In chapter 11, Shields, Althof, Berkowitz, and Navarro touch on how they managed the faculty turnover of a dean and two key faculty leaders as they were in the process of a massive project to integrate character and citizenship education into their teacher preparation program at the University of St Louis-Missouri.

The essays offer numerous examples of the processes that teacher educators have navigated in order to integrate moral education into their teacher preparation programs. For example, Shields et al. (chapter 11) show how they created a theoretical framework that includes constructivism, attachment theory, democratic pedagogy and socialization theory, and explain how they established six primary goals for implementation. In this way, these educator-scholars walk us through their process, complete with successes and challenges. One notable outcome of their particular journey is a compilation of critical articles on character education that will be used across the curriculum. This core text (Shields, Funk, & Berkowitz, in press) is a collection worth investigating.

A core theme, with which many of the authors grapple, is the infusion versus separate teaching of moral education approaches and methods. Lapsley, Holter, and Narvaez’s chapter, ‘Teaching for Character: Three Alternatives for Teacher Education’, identifies three approaches, best practice teaching (infusion), broad, and intentional moral character education, favoring an integration of all three. Their reasoning is that children have lost extensive supports outside of school necessitating teachers to take a larger role in moral formation, which requires adopting a deliberate and infused, broad-based approach. Similarly, Nucci describes the success of Developmental Teacher Education which infused preparation to teach morality within every course instead of isolating the topic in one course.

Virginia Richardson concludes the collection by synthesizing and highlighting this and other common themes cutting across the chapters. She also recommends avenues for future research and muses about the effects of dividing the collection in terms of philosophical and psychological perspectives rather than teaching morally versus teaching morality. Her metacognitive reflection provides a thoughtful conclusion to the compendium.

Perhaps my one regret about the essays is that there are not more examples of how teaching morally and teaching morality play out in the primary and secondary classrooms that these aspiring teachers go on to lead. While a few sections do highlight the experience of program alumni (most notably Fallona and Canniff’s chapter on the University of Southern Maine; and Watson, Benson, Daly, and Pelton’s chapter on the Child Development Project), it would be informative to see these programs’ results in the field. Nonetheless, the collection serves as a practical reference for teacher educators, and the editors’ and contributors’ acknowledgement of the need for more such research might suggest this as a topic for a follow-up edition.

Ultimately, Sanger and Osguthorpe’s collection is built on the premise that, whether educators know it or not, ‘anyone teaching in a classroom, to varying degrees and with different levels of success, engages in teaching morally and teaching morality’ (p. 3). If this premise, which lies at the heart of the book’s mission, is true, the critical question is how to teach morally and morality both intentionally and effectively. To this end, the essays become valuable templates from real-life ventures. Committed teacher educators would do well to take a look.

Madora Soutter
Doctoral candidate, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Email: [email protected]
© 2014, Madora Soutter
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240.2014.904549