Matthew N. Sanger

Making sense of approaches to moral education

This paper presents a metatheoretical analysis of ‘approaches’ to moral education and how we make sense of them. Such approaches are commonly analyzed with simple, binary category schemes, for example, being categorized as either ‘indirect’ or ‘direct’ in nature. This kind of minimal framework clearly oversimplifies the complex nature of any approach. Despite this, the moral education literature continues to suffer from a lack of appropriately complex, systematic, and robust analytic frameworks to help us understand the complexities of moral education and its study. Our analysis elaborates some basic challenges in making sense of approaches to moral education. We then develop a framework that can meet these challenges, and assist students, scholars and researchers in developing a critical understanding of the complex underpinnings of any approach to moral education, and the analyses of those approaches found in the moral education literature.

The Moral Nature of Teacher Candidate Beliefs about the Purposes of Schooling and Their Reasons for Choosing Teaching as a Career.

This study reports teacher candidate beliefs about the purposes of schooling and their reasons for choosing a career in teaching. The beliefs are analyzed in relation to the moral work of teaching, and the findings suggest that teacher candidates choose teaching as a career, in part, to engage in moral work, and that they believe that schooling has moral ends. The article concludes by providing implications for teacher education research and practice, suggesting that these implications have particular relevance in the current environment of high-stakes testing and accountability, as well as for constructivist teacher educators who seek to understand and meaningfully respond to their teacher candidates’ beliefs.

The Schizophrenia of Contemporary Education and the Moral Work of Teaching

Stocker’s classic and provocatively titled essay “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theory” (1976/1997) takes to task a certain type of philosophical work. Modern ethical theories, as Stocker puts it, “deal only with reasons . . . with what justifies. They fail to examine motives and the motivational structures and constraints of ethical life” (p. 453). Because of this, he claims, leading a life guided by a modern ethical theory is either impoverished, due to its narrow and self-defeating pursuit of the theories’ prescribed end, or worse, in a schizophrenic malady of the spirit:

Analysing the Child Development Project using the Moral Work of Teaching Framework

This inquiry applies the Moral Work of Teaching (MWT) Framework to analyse the psychological, moral and educational assumptions, and the contingent factors, that explain the basic features of the Child Development Projects (CDP) approach to moral education. The analysis, it is suggested, not only illuminates the CDPs approach, but the virtues and implications of using an appropriately complex, theoretically descriptive framework, such as the MWT Framework, as a tool for understanding, comparing, developing and applying approaches to moral education.

On the Road to Theorizing Practice in the Social Foundations.

This essay attempts to shed light on key influences on the process of becoming a social foundations educator, focusing on the problem of how to conceptualize the work and aims of a social foundations practice. A suggested solution to this problem lies in the concept of “theorizing practice.” The essay briefly elaborates this concept, and its potential role in the practice of social foundations educators, and that of their students.