FILIPINA DOCTORA

The pragmatic issues outlined in the last section do not provide a sufficiently

comprehensive account of possible prospects and challenges for an ethically reflexive orientation. In this section I consider another of Keown’s (1998) explanations as to why New Zealand teachers tend to avoid values and social action, and instead place greater emphasis on knowledge and skills. He argues that “those in the Western tradition tend to place a very high value on reason, on knowledge, and on the cognitive and tend to undervalue feelings, aesthetics and the affective” (p. 139). This he describes as a dualistic rather than holistic view of education. A related issue identified by Keown is that

concepts, facts and skills are rather more straightforward to assess than affective and participatory outcomes. Commenting on developments subsequent to the publication of

Social studies in the New Zealand curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1997), Rowena Taylor

and Rose Atkins (2005) suggest that this has continued to be the case. While teachers and students have found collaboratively developed templates helpful in terms of clarifying senior social studies assessment requirements (Wood, 2005, as cited in Aitken & Sinnema, 2008), Taylor and Atkins (2005) observe that even where attempts have been made to assess values exploration, this amounts to generic ‘fill in the box’

comprehension activities of discrete elements of the process. A risk is that “students can conduct assessments in quite a dispassionate manner as they are not required to reflect on or clarify their own values, or make the transfer to their own values schema, and internalise such values” (p. 134). By extension, the emphasis on critical reflection may marginalise the lived experience and imaginative aspects of ethical reflexivity.

Bronwyn Wood (2007) has argued that social studies teachers’ tendency to favour concepts, facts and skills – and thereby avoid societal controversy – has been

exacerbated by the scientific management of education. She draws this argument from the work of Jim Neyland (2004, 2010) whose account is, of course, only one

explanation. Neyland’s (2010) view is that “under scientific management, education must, in ever increasing detail, be made readable, recountable in writing, and enumerable so that it can be monitored and managed” (p. 51). This is expressed, for example, in the molecular nature of social studies curriculum and assessment: achievement objectives,

achievement standards, and assessment programmes at Years 9 and 10 which tend to rely on NCEA-like rubrics (Picken & Milligan, 2013). It is also detectable in Notman’s (2012) recommendation that New Zealand students’ learning about values be

benchmarked “in the manner of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study” (p. 48). Neyland traces a marked shift towards scientific management from the 1980s onwards but, like the associated neo-liberal political and educational reforms, it is important to note that this shift was as much a matter of continuity as it was change. Neyland (2005) himself records that a number of social theorists, as early as the 1950s, were arguing that “Western culture is in the grip of a trend towards a largely

unquestioned instrumentalism” (p. 110-111). In his view, this preoccupation with the means rather than purposes of education “enfeebles the curriculum’s ethical

orientation” (p. 109) because teachers and students are not invited to participate in questions as to education’s purpose, or asked to explore the good life for themselves. Similarly, Paul Standish (2003) has argued that instrumental reason “has emaciated the ethical language in which we consider our lives and education, distorting the public and private realms of our experience” (p. 230).

One does not have to look too far afield to see how scientific management could manifest itself in relation to the potential expression of ethical decision-making and action in New Zealand’s curriculum development. Just across ‘the ditch’49_{, ethical}

understanding is now identified as one of seven general capabilities to be developed across the Australian Curriculum (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2014)50_{. This represents a significant shift from curriculum development in}

the mid-2000s which focussed on identifying values to be encouraged in Australian schools (Australian Government Department of Education, 2005)5152_{. By contrast,}

‘ethical understanding’ in the Australian Curriculum now focuses on assisting “students to engage with the more complex issues that they are likely to encounter in the future, and to navigate a world of competing values, rights, interests and norms” (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2014, p. 1). This general capability has

49 _{The Tasman Sea.}

50 _{These are: Literacy, Numeracy, Information and communication technology (ICT) capability, Critical and creative}

thinking, Personal and social capability, Ethical understanding, Intercultural understanding.

51 _{At that time, The National framework for values education in Australian schools (Australian Government Department of}

Education, 2005) defined values education as: “Any explicit and /or implicit school-based activity which promotes student understanding and knowledge of values, and which develops the skills and dispositions of students so they can enact particular values as individuals and members of the wider community” (p. 8).

52 _{Interestingly, the association between ethics and value of integrity is akin to the Values statement in New}

three inter-related organising elements: understanding ethical concepts and issues; reasoning in decision making and actions; and exploring values, rights and

responsibilities. Further, the ethical understandings that students can reasonably be expected to have developed across Levels 1 to 6 are identified for each of the organising elements – a broad developmental sequence comprising 48 discrete indicators.

Australia’s recent focus on ethical understanding could be considered as something of a model for New Zealand teachers wishing to make sense of the phrase ethical decision- making and action. The document represents a significant possible future for materials development, not least because ethics occupies an explicit, central and critical place in the curriculum. I think we would want to exercise some caution about mirroring this path, partly because many incoherent statements are made throughout the document. For example, what constitutes a distinction between “ethical and non-ethical dimensions of ethical issues” (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2014, p. 7) or “the objectivity or subjectivity behind decision-making where there are many possible consequences” (p. 9) is not made clear. My more substantive concerns, however, relate to an impoverished approach to supporting learners’ ethical decision- making and action. The document does little to elucidate the range of ethical

perspectives that inform conflict, complexity and uncertainty; only oblique references are made to character, principles and consequences, for example. Consequently, teachers and learners are offered little in the way of intellectual tools with which to agonise with ethical issues.

But it is the learning continuum in the last pages of the document (Australian

Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2014) that most keenly suggests that scientific management could present something of a handbrake for ethically reflexive approaches. This is for at least three inter-related reasons. First, not only are the developmental assumptions open to question but the molecular approach of the

learning progression misrepresents the complexity of ethical decision-making and action and the interpenetrated nature of social and ethical issues. Second, the teachers and students are not participants in questions about the good life; instead they are

participants in mastering the component pieces of ethical understanding. Teachers and students become the deliverers and the recipients of pre-packaged ethical understanding in which students are positioned as the “aggregates of traits in such a way that it is difficult to reassemble the face of the individual” (Neyland, 2004, p. 156). Third, the lived (including emotional and embodied) and imaginative dimensions of an ethically

reflexive life are entirely subordinated to an emphasis on orderly rational thought, which is reflective of the entire document’s tenor. As Neyland (2010) would argue, the spirit of education is marginalised: pleasure, creativity, learning for its own sake, and the use of humour as a response to the ‘itch for certainty’, for example.

In sum, if the ethical dimensions of New Zealand’s curriculum are to be managed scientifically, the prospects for an ethically reflexive approach to better supporting social studies learners’ ethical decision-making and action seem enervated. Yet we might take some comfort from the literature that increasingly takes exception with instrumental reason and scientific management, whether within education or elsewhere – this is because much of what goes on in society is concerned with the question of what is the next best decision in a never-ending agonistic struggle. Instrumental reason, scientific management and as I turn to in the next section, scientific evidence (at least) have nothing compelling to say here.