Professionalism and Ethics in Teaching (Professional Ethics)

283 Pages·1999·1.67 MB·English

by  David Carr

PROFESSIONALISM AND ETHICS IN
TEACHING
Professionalism and Ethics in Teaching examines the ethical issues in
teaching. After discussing the moral implications of professionalism,
the author explores the relationship of education theory to teaching
practice and the impact of this relationship on professional expertise.
He then identifies and examines some central ethical and moral
issues in education and teaching. Finally, David Carr gives a detailed
analysis of a range of issues concerning the role of the teacher and the
management of educational institutions.
Professionalism and Ethics in Teaching presents a thought-
provoking and stimulating study of the moral dimensions of the
teaching profession.
David Carr is Professor of Philosophy of Education in the Faculty of
Education at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of
Educating the Virtues (1991) and editor of Education, Knowledge and
Truth (1998).
ii
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
Editor: Ruth Chadwick
Centre for Professional Ethics, University of
Central Lancashire
Professionalism is a subject of interest to academics, the general
public and would-be professional groups. Traditional ideas of
professions and professional conduct have been challenged by recent
social, political and technological changes. One result has been the
development for almost every profession of an ethical code of conduct
which attempts to formalise its values and standards. These codes of
conduct raise a number of questions about the status of a ‘profession’
and the consequent moral implications for behaviour.
This series seeks to examine these questions both critically and
constructively. Individual volumes will consider issues relevant to
particular professions, including nursing, genetic counselling,
journalism, business, the food industry and law. Other volumes will
address issues relevant to all professional groups such as the function
and value of a code of ethics and the demands of confidentiality.
Also available in this series:
ETHICAL ISSUES IN FOOD ETHICS
JOURNALISM AND THE Edited by Ben Mepham
MEDIA
CURRENT ISSUES IN
Edited by Andrew Belsey and
BUSINESS ETHICS
Ruth Chadwick
Edited by Peter W.F.Davies
GENETIC COUNSELLING
THE ETHICS OF BANKRUPTCY
Edited by Angus Clarke
Jukka Kilpi
ETHICAL ISSUES IN NURSING
ETHICAL ISSUES IN
Edited by Geoffrey Hunt
ACCOUNTING
THE GROUND OF Edited by Catherine Gowthorpe
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS and John Blake
Daryl Koehn
ETHICS AND VALUES IN
ETHICAL ISSUES IN SOCIAL HEALTH CARE MANAGEMENT
WORK Edited by Souzy Dracopoulou
Edited by Richard Hugman and
David Smith
ETHICS AND COMMUNITY IN
THE HEALTH CARE
PROFESSIONS
Edited by Michael Parker
PROFESSIONALISM
AND ETHICS IN
TEACHING
David Carr
London and New York
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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© 2000 David Carr
The right of David Carr to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record has been requested for this title
ISBN 0-203-97939-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-18459-2 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-18460-6 (pbk)
CONTENTS
Series editor’s preface vii
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
PART I Education, teaching and professionalism 1
1 Teaching and education 3
2 Professions, professionalism and professional 21
ethics
3 Teaching and professionalism 39
PART II Educational theory and professional practice 57
4 Educational theory misapplied? 59
5 Different faces of educational theory 75
6 Teaching and competence 91
PART III Professional values and ethical objectivity 109
7 Professional values and the objectivity of value 111
8 Rival conceptions of education 129
PART IV Ethics and education, morality and the teacher 147
9 Educational rights and professional wrongs 149
10 Aims of education, schooling and teaching 165
11 The moral role of the teacher 183
PART V Particular issues 201
12 Ethical issues concerning the role of the teacher 203
13 Ethical issues concerning education and schooling 221
vi
Notes 239
Bibliography 257
Index 265
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
Professional ethics is now acknowledged as a field of study in its own
right. Much of its recent development has resulted from rethinking
traditional medical ethics in the light of new moral problems arising
out of advances in medical science and technology. Applied
philosophers, ethicists and lawyers have devoted considerable energy
to exploring the dilemmas emerging from modern health-care
practices and their effect on the practitioner-patient relationship.
Beyond health care, other groups have begun to think critically
about the kind of service they offer and about the nature of the
relationship between provider and recipient. In many areas of life,
social, political and technological changes have challenged both
traditional ideas of practice and underlying conceptions of what
professions are. Competing trends towards ‘professionalisation’ on the
one hand (via, for example, the proliferation of codes of ethics, or of
professional conduct), and towards challenging the power of the
traditional ‘liberal professions’ on the other, have required exploration
of the concepts of ‘profession’ and ‘professional’.
The author of this volume argues a case for viewing the professions
as moral projects; and teaching and education as genuine professions.
He takes issue with views of teaching as simply competence based and
of the teacher as technician. In the face of modern sceptical positions
he explores the moral role of the teacher and the goals of teaching.
The Professional Ethics book series seeks to examine ethical issues
in the professions and related areas both critically and constructively.
Individual volumes address issues relevant to all professional groups,
such as the nature of a profession and the function and value of codes
of ethics. Other volumes examine issues relevant to particular
professions, including those which have hitherto received little
attention, such as social work, the insurance industry and
accountancy. This volume makes a contribution to both aims of the
series: the view of teaching presented here addresses both
philosophical issues about how professions should be regarded and
specific issues in contemporary debates about teaching.
PREFACE
This volume represents an attempt, to the best of my ability, to draw
together a decade of enquiries into the meaning of professionalism,
the relationship of educational theory and practice and the nature of
moral enquiry into a reasonably coherent whole. Although all these
topics have interested me throughout my professional educational life,
the path to this book can be traced back to an attempt in the summer
of 1990 to assemble a full-length exploration of the moral basis of
teaching and educational practice. This attempt was motivated mainly
by a certain antipathy to prevailing tendencies, at least in some
quarters, to technicist approaches to education, and by a concern to
demonstrate the wider value implicatedness of education and
teaching; in this respect, although this work is addressed to a rather
wider set of educational, cultural and epistemological concerns, these
original preoccupations should still be apparent in the present volume.
In the event, however, the earlier enterprise proved premature and
was abandoned following the completion of seven or eight draft
chapters.
However, material from this earlier venture did survive in the form
of two presently pertinent papers which were eventually published in
late 1992. The first was published under the title ‘Four dimensions of
educational professionalism’ in Westminster Studies in Education; the
second appeared as ‘Practical enquiry, values and the problem of
educational theory’ in Oxford Review of Education, and was later
reprinted in W.Hare and J.Portelli (eds), Philosophy of Education
(Detselig, 1996). Neither of these papers—with the exception of a
paragraph or so from the second one—survives in original form here,
but both were directly ancestral to the first two sections of this book.
The first paper on educational professionalism was published at about
the same time, more by coincidence than by design, as I found myself
charged with co-ordinating and teaching two courses focused on
professional issues—a cross-institutional module on professional
values and a modular Master’s course on professional knowledge and
practice—in my employing institution. Over the years, these courses—
ix
as well as numerous invitations to present papers on various aspects
of professional development to a variety of occupational groups—
afforded unprecedented opportunities to explore issues raised in
particularly the first two sections of this volume. In this respect, the
Westminster Studies paper is a not too remote forerunner of many of
the ideas discussed in Part 1—as well as of a recent Journal of
Applied Philosophy (1999) paper entitled ‘Professional education and
professional ethics’, upon which Chapter 2 is based.
However, it seems that the second paper for Oxford Review provided
an even more powerful springboard for further work throughout the
1990s on a variety of issues relating to the vexed educational problem
of the relationship of theory to practice. Moreover, despite having
written over the years on most topics of educational philosophy and
theory, if I was asked to choose one paper which I would regard as
having made a substantial contribution to the field as a whole, the
1995 Journal of Philosophy of Education paper, ‘Is understanding the
professional knowledge of teachers a theory-practice problem?’—upon
which Chapters 4 and 5 are based—would have to be a strong
contender. Notwithstanding that, so far as I can see, this paper has
had next to no influence in the extensive literature of educational
philosophy and theory (perhaps the less than prepossessing title did
not help); where it has been noticed it has been seriously
misunderstood, although it has more than likely been overshadowed
by papers on the same theme by names more famous than mine, it
still seems to me that it goes rather further in terms of basic analysis
of this difficult problem than many if not most of its contemporaries.
Be that as it may, as well as having clear ancestry in the earlier
Oxford Review piece, this paper is also strongly related to critiques of
the competency conception of teacher education and training which I
mounted around the same time in several other places. Chapter 6,
indeed, is effectively a revised version of a paper entitled ‘Questions of
competence’, published in the British Journal of Educational Studies
in 1993.
In brief, whereas Part 1 of this book is concerned to demonstrate the
inherently ethical character of any distinctive occupational category of
profession—to show that the standard professions are in a significant
sense moral projects—and to defend the claim that teaching and
education are genuine professions in this sense, Part 2 is concerned to
show that the knowledge and expertise of teachers is essentially
grounded in the kind of practical deliberation which Aristotle
distinguished as phronesis or moral wisdom from techne or productive
reasoning (though it is not denied that teachers and other
professionals need both). Part 3, therefore, turns to the important task
of defending—in the teeth of various kinds of contemporary