Moral education and the challenge of pre-service professional formation for teachers

ABSTRACT

As teaching, irrespective of its geographical location involves personal relationships, all teachers are in some sense moral educators through the ‘hidden curriculum’, or learning which takes place through the process of being educated. However, teacher education (TE) in many parts of the world is increasingly preoccupied with content and academic attainment for its own sake, rendering it insufficiently attentive to those fundamentally human concerns that characterize teaching and through which teachers educate their students. This paper attends to those elements that professional formation must include to support teachers as moral educators effectively, whether or not they identify as curriculum specialists in this area. I conclude by outlining three specific examples of initiatives which address current deficiencies in practical terms through reclaiming ‘leaky’ spaces within conventional pre-service programmes: ‘Philosophy for Teachers’ (P4T), ‘Shared Space’ and ‘Going Global’.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral education
• theory
• teacher education
• ethical deliberation
• dialogue

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Janet Orchard

Janet Orchard is Programme Director of the University of Bristol’s EdD programme in Hong Kong, having been a teacher and administrator in schools in England and a teacher educator at the Institute of Education, University of London and the Department of Education University of Oxford prior to moving Bristol. As a philosopher of education, she is a member of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA), the International Network of Philosophy of Education (INPE) and the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain (PESGB), where she is on the Editorial Board of its topical pamphlet series, ‘IMPACT’. She takes a comparative interest in the relationship between philosophy of education and teacher education and is developing a new model of critical reflection for teachers called ‘Philosophy for Teachers’ in England, Hong Kong and South Africa. Her teaching subject is Religious Education (RE) and she is currently engaged in researching the place of intergroup dialogue in schooling, including the contribution which RE makes to promoting good community relations.