This interview features Dr. Bruce Maxwell, lead author of “A Five-Country Survey on Ethics Education in Pre-Service Teaching Programs”, recently published in JTE and available online here. An interview with one of Dr. Maxwell’s co-authors, Dr. Helen Boon, can be found here.
1.What motivated you to pursue this particular research topic?
I came to teacher ethics from bioethics. When I was hired in a faculty position to teach professional ethics to future teachers, it never occurred to me that future teachers might not have the kind of exposure to ethical issues, content and courses that is common in fields like medicine, dentistry and engineering. That all changed when I started to attend educational research conferences and met colleagues who were also interested in ethical issues in teaching. Through those conversations, I was quickly led to the belief that dedicated ethics courses are considered to be rare and unusual in pre-service teacher education.
Having heard about surveys on ethics education in medical education through my contacts in bioethics—particularly the 1999 survey by Musick which everyone seemed to be talking about after it came out—I turned to the literature to see whether any similar work had been done in teaching. What I found was that, while the scholarly writings on teaching ethics to future teachers were full of anecdotal reports to the effect that teacher ethics had been left behind by the ethics movement in higher education, there was really only one comparable survey that had been conducted on the topic—namely, Glanzer and Ream’s paper published in 2007. Nobody in teacher education seemed to be referring to it, though, and this was probably for two reasons: first, it was cross-disciplinary (i.e., it surveyed ethics education in teaching and several other programs of study); and second, and possibly more importantly, it focused on a slightly idiosyncratic sample of religiously affiliated universities and colleges. Hence, the results were of limited generalizability to the large, publicly funded educational institutions of where most teachers obtain their teaching degrees. So, I took it on myself to take a second look at Glanzer and Ream’s results using a more representative sample that was also international in scope.
2. Were there any specific external events that influenced your decision to engage in this research study?
It may not be an “event” as such, but I continue to be dumbstruck by how it is that we in teacher education so strongly support the movement to professionalize teaching, which includes modelling teacher education on medical education and setting up codes of ethics, and yet at the same time act as if professional ethics is some kind of added extra that can be just dismissed from programs on the grounds that there is “no time” or because other content and topics are considered to be more important.
If there is one point I would like to emphasize here, it is that where a code of ethics is in place and where teachers are held accountable to the code and can face disciplinary action for not adhering to it—and this is true for virtually every jurisdiction in North America to my knowledge—it is simply unfair to teachers not to make sure that they know what is in the code and understand it. The good news that came out of our research project was the dedicated ethics courses in pre-service teacher are a lot more common than many people seem to think and that, across the board, teacher educators think that ethics content is a very important part of pre-service teacher education. The bad news is that the results suggested that ethics content is still widely regarded as a second-class subject rather than an essential part of the core curriculum of teacher education.
3. What were some difficulties you encountered with the research?
We encountered many difficulties of several different kinds in this research but, from a methodological standpoint, the existence of so many different teacher education programs is a huge challenge for survey research in teacher education and it was a huge challenge for us. Unlike in medicine and dentistry where departments typically offer one common basic degree, in education even relatively small departments offer multiple programs each of which can have their own set of core courses. This makes generalizing about the content of teacher education a real trick.
4. What didn’t make it into the article that you want to talk about?
In the manual calendar search, we collected data on required courses in the area of social foundations in education—educational law, social justice in education, multicultural education, philosophy of education, history of education, sociology of education, etc.—which would, I am sure, have been of interest to many of the readers of the article. We opted not to include this material to keep the paper focused.
5. What current areas of research are you pursuing?
I am working on a review article on the professional ethics education for future teachers and a content analysis of codes of ethics for teachers. The results of work on codes of ethics have turned out to defy my expectations. I went into the project thinking I might find more common ground on what the principal ethical obligations of teachers are only to discover that the same kind of heterogeneity that exists in the scholarly literature on professional ethics in teaching is reflected in actual codes of ethics for teachers!