The ethical dimension of teacher practical knowledge: a narrative inquiry into Chinese teachers’ thinking and actions in dilemmatic spaces

Abstract

Previous research concerning teacher practical knowledge has revealed its epistemological foundations, content structure and research methodology, but little research examines its ethical dimension. Based on a four-year project in China, this study probes the ethical dimension of an experienced teacher’s practical knowledge, explicated in a dilemmatic but teachable moment. Narrative inquiry is used as both a research method and a representational form to reveal the teacher’s ethical decisions and actions in the nested macro–meso–micro dilemmatic spaces. It is found that the teacher’s practical knowledge is embedded in a complicated web of meanings, and tapestried by her compromise to the national policies, her negotiation with the school governance and her caring for her students with diverse backgrounds. The ethical dimension of her practical knowledge provides her a vital power to carry out her educational practice. It is advocated that an ‘ethical turn’ for research and practice in teacher professional development is needed, so as to authorize teachers’ professionality reflected in their roles as humanity cultivators and transformative intellectuals. Moreover, under the global educational reform context since late 1990s, this article can be seen not only as a case from China, but also has implications for other countries in the world.

Keywords:

• Teacher knowledge
• practical knowledge
• ethics
• dilemmatic spaces
• narrative inquiry

Acknowledgements

We thank all the participating schools, teachers and university researchers for their contribution to the research. Special thanks go to Ms Lee for her generous sharing of her story with us. We are also grateful to the three reviewers and Dr Zongyi Deng for their insightful comments and suggestions for further revision of this article.

Notes

1. Ethics and morality overlap in their connotation and denotation, and are often interchangeable in their daily usage. From the philosophic perspective, however, morality is more concerned with personal behaviour, and implies principles of right or wrong with subjective judgements. Ethics, in comparison, is composed of a set of principles concerning good or bad in societal conducts (Ricoeur, 1990/1992, pp. 170, 171). Based on this understanding, we use moral/morality to refer to teachers’ concrete thinking and actions, and ethical/ethics to describe teachers’ abstract practical knowledge and professional identity in this article.

2. In Chinese traditional classics, such as The Analects (BC 475) and The Great Learning (BC 500), teachers are more morality cultivators than professional craftsmen. The former is called Renshi (人师), which means that someone is a teacher because his task is to teach the young to become humane. The later is called Jingshi (经师), which means that someone is a teacher who only teaches the doxa from textbooks.

3. This idea and its statements are suggested by one of the reviewers for the draft of this article. Our thanks go to the reviewer.

4. The idea in this paragraph is also quoted from one of the reviewers for the draft of this article. We would like to thank the reviewer.