The moral aspects of teacher educators' practices

Abstract

The growing political, social and scientific attention that is being devoted to the moral aspects of teaching has implications for teacher education. This paper reports on a study of the actual moral education practices of 54 teacher educators within one institution. We encouraged these teacher educators to make their values explicit and to explain how they put them into practice. Nine teacher educators were studied in detail. These teacher educators were then stimulated to reflect on their values by completing charts to analyse the moral aspects of their practices. In addition, one of their lessons was videotaped and discussed. An important conclusion of this study is that whilst the responsibility for preparing student teachers for moral education rests with individual teacher educators, this process is largely implicit and unplanned. This is due in part to the lack of a language for expressing the moral dimension in teaching. Both teacher educators and students emphasise the importance of the role that attitudes play in the expression of values by teacher educators.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the teacher educators and student teachers who participated in this study. We are especially grateful to Folkert Sonsma, who facilitated the data collection process and gave useful insider comments on the design of the study and on this article. We also wish to thank Hildelien Verkuyl for her contributions to the meetings with the teacher educators and to our research.