Professional ethics education for future teachers: A narrative review of the scholarly writings

Abstract

This article provides a narrative review of the scholarly writings on professional ethics education for future teachers. Against the background of a widespread belief among scholars working in this area that longstanding and sustained research and reflection on the ethics of teaching have had little impact on the teacher education curriculum, the article takes stock of the field by synthesizing viewpoints on key aspects of teaching ethics to teacher candidates—the role ethics plays in teacher education, the primary objectives of ethics education for teachers, recommended teaching and learning strategies, and challenges to introducing ethics curriculum—and maps out how opinions on these matters have evolved over the three decades since the initial publication of Strike and Soltis’ seminal book, The Ethics of Teaching. In light of the review’s results, the article identifies critical deficits in this literature and proposes a set of recommendations for future inquiry.

Keywords:

• Professional ethics
• ethics in teaching
• literature review
• teacher education
• teacher professionalism

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Muriel Bebeau (University of Minnesota), Helen Boon (James Cook University), Elizabeth Campbell (University of Toronto), France Jutras (Université de Sherbooke), William Smale (Trent University) and two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable feedback on an earlier version of this article. Presentations of the project were given at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values of the University of Birmingham and at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University. The authors wish to thank audience members for the valuable feedback and encouragement offered on those occasions.

Notes

1. Some continue to regard the theoretical framework on which the Defining Issues Test is based—Kohlberg’s theory of cognitive moral judgment development—as controversial but the DIT remains the most widely used and well-validated standardized assessments of moral judgment development (Thoma, 2006). Since its inception, the Kohlbergian paradigm has been dogged by criticisms, most notably for being biased against women (Gilligan, 1982) and for mistaking an ideal of morality that is particular to Western, liberal, well-educated people for a universal standard (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Liebert, 1984). Both of these claims have been the object of extensive and rigorous empirical investigation. Research findings suggest that the claim to gender bias cannot be sustained (Walker, 2006) and have provided confirmation of the cross-cultural validity of Kohlberg’s six-stage scheme (Snarey, 1985; Snarey & Samuelson, 2008).

2. See, for example, the survey research on the state of ethics education previously conducted in medicine (Lehmann, Kasoff, Koch, & Federman, 2004), business (Christensen, Peirce, Hartman, Hoffman, & Carrier, 2007), dentistry (Berk, 2001; Lantz, Bebeau, & Zarkowski, 2011), occupational therapy and physiotherapy (Hudon et al., 2013), neuroscience (Walther, 2013) and engineering (Stephan, 1999).

3. See especially Winston’s (2007) cross-disciplinary meta-analysis of research on the effects of ethics education on ethical leadership and decision making and Warnick and Silverman’s (2011, pp. 273–274) discussion of this issue as it applies to teaching.