(Download) "Teaching Morally and Teaching Morality (Essay)" by Teacher Education Quarterly " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Teaching Morally and Teaching Morality (Essay)
- Author : Teacher Education Quarterly
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 195 KB
Description
Student achievement is not the only topic of conversation in teachers' lounges, parent-teacher organizations, and teacher education classrooms. There is also much discussion of the moral features of teaching and learning. Sometimes this talk centers on such issues as prayer in schools, sex education, and whether there are just grounds for teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. At other times, the conversation is about a teacher's own moral values and whether or not these values should be communicated to one's students. When the talk turns to a teacher's own moral values, it often becomes entangled in whether it is even possible to provide a thorough and adequate education in the absence of certain moral values, as well as whether teachers are and should be the proper agents for the transmission of such values. These are thorny issues, which all too often get pushed aside because of their complexity and the ease with which they seem to foster disagreement. We believe there are ways to sort through these issues, ways that are not only helpful in resolving many of the tensions in the moral education debate, but ways that enable more powerful approaches to teaching and learning. To make our argument we introduce what we believe is an important distinction between teaching morality and teaching morally. In P-12 schools, the moral education debate often focuses on character education programs or other moral curricula. Such programs and curricula are championed as a means of teaching morality and transmitting moral virtue from one generation to the next. They are also derided as programs that have no place in the school curriculum because of the concern that morality is a matter of personal preference, religious conviction, or cultural commitment. Although this concern is worthy, it has, we believe, blocked us from attending to the more subtle ways that teachers, the larger society, and the state bring moral matters into the classroom, even when they do not adopt specific moral curricula. We understand these other ways of attending to moral matters as teaching morally.