Teacher Education Seminar Series Description

2008-2009

Topic: Practical Ethics in the Work of Teaching: Implications for the Teacher Education Curriculum

The University of Michigan has an unusual commitment to professional education and a distinguished School of Education. We are home to one of the oldest programs in teacher education in the United States. With that history as our foundation, we are setting out to reinvent how we educate teachers at Michigan. Our goal is to make professional practice the centerpiece of teacher education, and to help our students learn to do the complex relational, psychological, social, and intellectual work of teaching. Our 2008-2009 Teacher Education Seminar Series will support that work by providing an opportunity for our own learning about the ethical and moral entailments of teaching and the ways in which professional education might support new teachers to assume the obligations of their role.

The topic for this year’s seminar series is motivated by our awareness of the profound ethical entailments of teaching. The role of teacher carries with it substantial moral imperatives that often remain invisible and un-discussed––to insure equitable access to learning, for example, or to treat young learners with respect and dignity. At the same time, the teaching profession lacks a clear code of ethics. To complicate matters, the field of teacher education typically conflates issues of equity, social justice, and diversity, leaving beginning teachers aware that society and its schools are unequal but uncertain about how to respond. Moreover, there is a tendency in teacher education to treat these issues by focusing on student teachers’ “beliefs” and on attempting to change those beliefs through persuasion. Teacher education lags behind virtually every other profession in its treatment of these important issues.

One goal of the Teacher Education Initiative (TEI) at the University of Michigan is to introduce explicit attention to ethics to our curriculum for learning teaching and to integrate it with our work on social justice and diversity. To this end, our 2008-2009 Teacher Education Seminar Series will focus on professional ethics for teachers. The series is designed to help us consider the key ethical questions confronting teachers and to imagine how we might help our students understand and respond to those questions in practice.

Two thematic strands will run throughout this series. One will focus on conceptualizing the ethical imperatives of teachers’ work, and the other on how several fields of professional education teach ethics. Our goal in working on the first strand will be to interrogate ideas and terms that are frequently applied to the work of teaching, including “caring”, “equity”, “equality”, and “social justice”. We will seek to define these terms carefully, to understand the differences among them, and to identify their instantiations in teachers’ practice. In relation to the second strand, our goal will be to consider how teacher educators might develop a curriculum for helping student teachers understand the moral and ethical imperatives they face and learn to attend to them deliberately in practice.

This seminar series is part of the TEI Ethics Project, a special strand of the Teacher Education Initiative’s work to redesign the curriculum for learning teaching. The series will conclude with a presentation by members of the Ethics Project Working Group, who will share their work to articulate a set of ethical imperatives for teachers and their recommendations for how instructors at the University of Michigan might develop an ethics curriculum for student teachers. The TEI Ethics Project, including this year’s seminar series, is generously supported by a grant from the Center for Ethics in Pubic Life at the University of Michigan.

Symposium Topics, Presenters, & Readings

Part I: Conceptualizing Ethical Imperatives of Teachers’ Work
Date	Topic	Presenters & Readings
October 10, 2008 3:00 pm Tribute Room	Developing Professionalism: Framing the Problem What are the dimensions of professional character? How is it developed? What particular professional and ethical imperatives do teachers face?	David Stern University of Michigan School of Medicine Deborah Loewenberg Ball University of Michigan School of Education Click to download readings for this seminar: Stern, David, The Developing Physician: Becoming a Professional Ball, Deborah, Integrity in Teaching: Recognizing the Fusion of the Moral and Intellectual Buchmann, Margaret, Role Over Person: Morality and Authenticity in Teaching
October 27, 2008 4:00 pm Tribute Room	Ethical Knowledge in Teaching What might it mean to “care” about students and to be relentlessly committed to every child’s success? How might student teachers learn to “care”? What is the nature of the specialized kind of caring that accrues from the fact that the work is about helping students learn academic subject-matter?	Elizabeth Campbell University of Toronto Center for Ethics Click to download readings for this seminar: Campbell, Elizabeth, Teaching Ethically as a Moral Condition of Professionalism Campbell, Elizabeth, Review of the Literature: The Ethics of Teaching as a Moral Profession
December 9, 2008 4:00 pm Tribute Room	Equity, Equality, and Social Justice What is the difference between equity and equality? What is the relationship of each of these ideas to social justice? What are the implications for teachers?	Harry Brighouse University of Wisconsin – Madison (Department of Philosophy) Click to download readings for this seminar: Harry Brighouse, Moral and Political Aspects of Education Harry Brighouse, Putting Educational Equality in its Place Christopher Jencks, Whom Must We Treat Equally for Educational Opportunity to be Equal?
Part II: Toward Developing a Professional Ethics Curriculum
January 26, 2009 4:00 pm Tribute Room	Ethics Education for Social Workers How does social work education help students internalize and act on ethical codes of practice?	Elizabeth A. Voshel University of Michigan School of Social Work
February 12, 2009 2:00 pm Tribute Room	Equity, Equality, & Social Justice in the Practice of Teaching: The Case of Success for All	Nancy A. Madden Success for All Foundation
February 24, 2009 3:00 pm Tribute Room	Ethics Education for Social Nurses: How does nursing education help students internalize and act on ethical codes of practice?	Penny Pierce University of Michigan School of Social Work
March 23, 2009 3:00 pm Tribute Room	Equity, Equality, and Social Justice in the Practice of Teaching: The Case of English Education (tentative title) How do issues of equity and equality intersect the work of teaching high school English? How can teachers realize a commitment to social justice in the context of instruction? How might teacher education help to prepare students to teach equitably?	Carol Lee Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy
Date TBD April 2009	Seminar Closing: Toward an Ethics Curriculum for Student Teachers What progress has the TEI Ethics Project made this year? What contributions does this work stand to make to the fields of ethics and teacher education?	Ethics Project Working Group Members Commentary by Harry Brighouse University of Wisconsin - Madison

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