Ethics in Teaching Project

Summary

School of Education

Indiana University Bloomington

The primary purpose of the Ethics in Teaching Project is to design and refine an ethics unit that may be included in the social foundations course required of all candidates for teacher certification at Indiana University--H340 Education and American Culture. For several years, one of the goals of that course has been to enable prospective teachers to understand that teaching has moral dimensions. However, the usual approach to meeting that goal, an introduction to ethical concepts combined with the analysis of cases, has not been particularly successful. Moreover, most of the graduate student Associate Instructors (AIs) of H340 have expressed some discomfort with and reluctance about the teaching of ethics. Therefore, this project attempts to broaden the possibilities for teaching ethics to prospective teachers, seeking content and methods that will make the study of ethics more compelling and meaningful to both students and instructors.

In brief, the Ethics in Teaching Project has:

• Consulted with Nel Noddings about the development of a unit.

• Designed an approach to the history of education based on American schools' efforts at moral education and a unit on democracy using videos, theoretical readings, and biography, and participatory activities for students.

• Field-tested the units in two sections of the required course.

• Conducted a formal evaluation of the two pilot sections.

• Redesigned the units in light of the evaluation.

• Shared the evaluation and units with current Associate Instructors.

• Field-tested the redesigned unit in four sections of the required course.

Last updated: 10 June 1996
URL: http://www.indiana.edu/~poynter/eep/iub.html
Comments: pimple@indiana.edu
Copyright 1996, The Trustees of Indiana University