Addressing Ethical Values in Educational Practice. An Essay
Addressing Ethical Values in Educational Practice. An Essay

Summary/Abstract: Teaching ethical aspects in the social sciences has always been a challenge, both for the professors and students involved. Ethical values and dilemmas can be presented through educational movies, examples from clinical, organizational or pedagogical practice, or even through personal disclosures offered with 'pros' and 'cons' arguments. In the past few years we took over this challenge, when conducting classes and seminaries at the disciplines "Educational Psychology" and "Foundations of Pedagogy" with first and second year students enrolled in the Teachers' Training Module, at the University "POLITEHNICA" of Bucharest. Several themes for applications (e.g., designing and conducting a social experiment; naive subjects; cooperation and empathy; obedience and authority; manipulation of external variables in a social context, e.g. a laboratory or a classroom) tackled the concept of how the moral values develop from childhood and adolescence through adulthood. For their exemplification we chose from time to time to present the series of experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram. In this classical, yet impossible to repeat nowadays experiment, he concluded that people- from various walks of life- obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative, even when acting against their own better judgment, moral values and desires. Discussing with the students about the results of this experiment left us, almost every time, with a controversial state- students divided themselves into 'those who obey' vs. 'rebels', with some of them situating in between ("obeyed but blames themselves') (exactly as the participants in the original experiments!) In the long run, due to this extraordinary reaction we had from our students, these applications used for educational purpose became more complex. Thus, we translated a topic for an essay used by us in a Master of Bioethics program in the USA (2014-2015) and we reframed it for educational purpose. The topic refers to "Death and dying" and presents 6 types of killing which are legally sanctioned in the United States, including, for example, killing in self-defence or the capital punishment. The initial task we had in the Master program was, leaving legality aside and focusing only on morality, to rank each six of the categories in order--most immoral (#1) to least immoral (#6) according to our personal values. In doing so, we were also asked to provide a moral argument to justifying our ranking. Also, we were told that for the purposes of this essay, religious or legal arguments are not acceptable. This essay presents in extenso a personal exemplification of a possible ranking of these categories, the results of the exercise performed with the students, and proposes furthermore an educational framework- ready to be used by them. Thus, we hope to offer a relevant and actual application for teaching ethical issues in an university setting, which goes beyond a mere description of theoretical concepts and provides ethical tools for understanding the social life.

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