INSTRUCTIVO DE LLENADO

This last part of the chapter troubles the discussion thus far, in which I have suggested that the prospects for ethical decision-making and action gaining an explicit toe-hold in New Zealand social studies teaching and learning are bleak, and that ethically reflexive approaches may be fraught with challenges. The discussion returns to the conversation between students, introduced in Chapter Two, and includes findings from focus group discussions with teachers in the school’s social studies department, about the place of ethics in social studies education. Given the limited and exploratory nature of this study, one needs to be careful about the promise of these data. Nevertheless, and from many years’ work as an adviser in schools, I emphasise that the context and findings of this study are unlikely to be extraordinary. I begin by outlining the research focus and methodology, and then consider how the findings from focus group discussions with the teachers and students speak to the challenges identified in this chapter.

The study57 _{reported here took place in a state, co-educational secondary school in the}

Wellington region, in which the students are predominantly New Zealand

European/Pākehā and drawn from a relatively high socio-economic area. The school

was selected largely on the basis of an existing relationship with its social sciences department, developed over some years in my role as an in-service adviser. This was not intended as a case study of teacher excellence; therefore, the sampling procedure did not try to identify schools in which there were social studies teachers who might be

considered experts in ethics education. Instead, the potential for the topic to be perceived as both sensitive and extraneous to their teaching programmes led to the selection of a school where a level of collegial trust was already established. Seven teachers within the social sciences department participated, all currently teaching Year 9 and 10 social studies. Six Year 9 social studies students (three boys and three girls) were selected from class members who volunteered to participate. This sample was not intended to be representative; I was interested in talking with a group of students who had shown interest in the subject matter and were willing to articulate their thoughts.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the meanings that teachers attach to ethical decision-making and action, and their responses to the inclusion of this statement in the

New Zealand curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). This study therefore rests on an

interpretative approach (Clark, 1997), where the focus is on the subjective meanings that social studies teachers bring to ethical decision-making and action. In order to permit open discussion, the study was not wedded to any particular ethical framework – such as a ‘character’ or Kohlbergian view (Kohlberg, 1981). One exception to this open-

endedness should be noted, however: teachers were introduced to the idea that ethics may be understood in a non-normative, descriptive sense.

Semi-structured focus group interviews were used in order to stimulate naturalistic and open conversation in a social setting (Grudens-Schuck, Allen, & Larson, 2004). Over two sessions, teachers discussed their understanding of, and enablers and constraints in relation to, supporting students’ ethical decision-making and action. The first discussion began by asking the teachers to share their thoughts about the nature and purposes of social studies and ethics education. This was followed by a concept-mapping exercise in which teachers established connections between 13 concepts proximal to ethical

decision-making and action,58 _{drawn from the Values section and social sciences learning}

area statement (Ministry of Education, 2007). Teachers were free to include other concepts if they wished. The questions and concept-mapping strategy (Novak & Cañas,

58 _{Ethical thinking, social inquiry, conceptual understanding, participating in society, social action, citizenship,}

challenging the basis of assumptions and perceptions, values, perspectives/worldviews, engaging critically with social issues, morals, cultural identities, affective/emotions.

2014) were designed to draw out the teachers’ existing conceptions of ethics and ethical decision-making. In preparation for the next interview, teachers were asked to reflect on the content and relevance of three web pages (BBC, 2014c; University of San Diego, 2014a, 2014b) that provide an overview of the field of ethics and ethical perspectives. In the second interview59_{, teachers were asked to report their responses to these web pages,}

as I was interested in whether greater exposure to the field of ethics and ethical

philosophies would shift their thinking about the relationship between ethics and social studies education. Teachers were also asked about their perceptions of the opportunities and challenges that a greater emphasis on ethical decision-making in social studies might present.

The findings from two focus group interviews with students are also reported here, in which they were asked to reflect on contemporary social issues with an ethical content and strategies for ethical thinking. Importantly, the students explored ethical decision- making and action from quite different angles. Whereas the teachers directly considered the concept of ethics, the students were not asked directly about the meanings that they attached to the concept. The students were, however, introduced to the concept of ethics as being about making decisions about what they should do and this definition appeared to make sense for them. Students completed a survey about their moral orientations60 _{and then debated the following scenario about accepting friends on}

Facebook61_:

Tania checks her Facebook site and finds a notification for a friend request and a brief message. It’s Mike Boswell, a guy she met at MacDonald’s when she was with a group of friends last week. She didn’t really talk much to Mike that day, but he seemed OK. She wasn’t really sure whether she would see him again. She feels kind of odd accepting him as a friend, but does so anyway, without responding to the message. What should Tania do now and why?

In another session, they explored an ethical issue of their choice, one that had arisen in the previous discussion about media ethics. The questions posed in this session were:

59 _{Due to unforeseen circumstances, this was conducted in two ‘bites’; Josh, Jessie, Alexa and Mia in one group, and}

Hana and Simon in the other. David was unable to participate in either of the second sessions.

60 _{Adapted from University of San Diego (2010). On a five point Likert scale, the students were asked how}

important the following are in their life: religious commands, following my conscience, looking out for myself, doing the right thing/doing my duty, showing respect for everyone, human rights, making the world a better place, justice/fairness, being a good person, caring about others.

61 _{Adapted from ‘When do I friend?’}

What sorts of images should the media be allowed to show on TV or in the newspaper? How should we decide what is OK/not OK for the media to show? They examined these through three ethical lenses (deontological/rule-based, consequentialist and virtues/character perspectives), selected so as to represent a range of perspectives and keep the conversation manageable. A written task-sheet with question prompts (see Appendix 5) was designed to support a ‘think/pair/share’ exploration of these ethical perspectives, but in reality the students preferred to think their way into the issue through conversation.

This study was not devoid of ethical dilemmas. All social studies staff in the department were invited to participate, and all accepted. In one staff member’s class, all students were invited to be participants in the focus group discussions. As there were more volunteers than needed, their teacher was asked to select six students on the basis of their ability to articulate their thoughts and likely interest in the project (criteria that were not disclosed to the students); it is possible that some students may have feel left out through this process. While I negotiated discussion times and venues to suit the social studies staff, I was conscious of the demands on their time. Further, and as the student focus group

interviews took place in class time, another challenge related to minimising the disruption to the students’ learning and ensuring that they were not disadvantaged in any way. The strategy I used was to have, with the teachers’ agreement, the remaining students in the Year 9 class participate in the same activities and discussion tasks described above. However, I acknowledge that this lesson was a diversion from the unit of learning at the time. By far the biggest ethical challenge lay in the analysis of the focus group interview discussions and, in particular, representing the teachers’ views. I was extremely conscious of not wanting to position the teachers as somehow lacking in relation to giving

expression to the ethical content of the Values statement (Ministry of Education, 2007); after all, I was just as mystified as them. However, my initial cut at writing up the results for publication left me concerned about how the teachers felt about the findings and how they had been represented. In retrospect, I wish I had built in more time for discussion with the social studies teachers about my emergent findings. Despite the fact that this would have taken up more of their time, I feel I could have done more to offset the risk of this study appearing as something being done to them, rather than with them.

I initially undertook an inductive thematic analysis of these data, paying attention to both the semantic and latent themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006). At that point I was particularly interested in the teachers’ views about the role of ethical perspectives in

students’ critical reflections, and in retrospect I think I was somewhat disappointed that this did not appear as compelling to them as it did to me. Part of the issue here was the coding process used, in which the coding categories – such as the teachers’ ‘conceptions of ethics’ and ‘pedagogical use of ethical perspectives’ – lacked a theoretical lens for analysis. The process of developing a stipulative definition for ethical reflexivity led me to return to these data, and this time I used a deductive approach to coding the teacher and student conversations, in which I coded for: (a) the meanings attached to ‘ethics’ (teachers only), (b) critical thinking, (c) lived experience and (d) imaginative action, and (e) the theoretical and pedagogical tensions implicitly and explicitly identified.

SIGNALLING THE SHIFTS IN MEANING

A first finding is perhaps entirely predictable given the interpretative challenges noted earlier in this chapter. For this group of teachers at least, the prospects for an ethically reflexive orientation would be likely dependent on greater semantic clarity and

elucidation about the work that ethical decision-making and action is intended to do in social studies education. All could see connections between ethics, their existing

teaching programmes and current controversies. They identified a wide range of units of work which have an ethical content, although not named as such to the students,

including contexts/topics such as ‘Earth Rights’, ‘Human Rights’, and ‘Values and Beliefs’. Yet, while all saw ethics as being relevant to social studies, they differed in their views about its centrality. Simon, with a university background in ethics, saw the

discipline as lying at the heart of social studies: “every topic we teach is about ethics. It’s about making choices in society. That’s what ethics is.” By contrast, Mia asked the group, “Aren’t we meant to be thinking about using, bringing in ethics into every unit we teach, or making it an aspect of each unit?” In the main, there was not a strong sense that the teachers saw ethical questions as lying at the heart of controversial issues and therefore being central to social studies. Furthermore, and in line with Keown’s (1998) research, it was clear that this was a ‘hard bit’ of social studies for which they needed greater pedagogical and content knowledge support. Alexa seemed to sum up the feeling of the group, that ethics was seen as a bit of an add-on:

If the term ethical values or whatever they call it in the NZC was clearer and it comes with resources for us to be able to look at and use, then I might be more comfortable, perhaps, doing a unit on ethics.

UNDERSTANDING SIDES OF A DEBATE: BRINGING IN CRITICAL REFLECTION How, then, did teachers conceive ethical decision-making and action? Most importantly, they largely wanted to eschew prescriptive interpretations and, in terms of an ethically reflexive orientation, placed considerable weight on critical reflection. Initially, however, six of the seven teachers aligned ethics with prescriptive morality. For example, Josh explained that ethics means “behaving properly towards others. I think of an ethical business person, you know, someone you can trust”. But at the same time the teachers wanted to distance themselves from morals and ethics, vastly preferring the term values because it felt less narrow and more usefully ambiguous. For example, Hana felt that values “is seen as a more PC, useable word than moral”. Mia added:

Well, it’s that word [ethics] isn’t it…we don’t use that word, we use ‘values’ which seems to be less value-laden than ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’… [and later said]… We don’t use that term. We haven’t before in social studies I think. It’s always been ‘values’ which has sat quite comfortably with me because it’s looking at different viewpoints isn’t it. What transpired was that what the teachers were wary about was ethics being perceived in a prescriptive sense. Josh and Alexa, for example worried that ethics and morals might “get parents’ backs up”. They themselves understood ethical decision-making and action as being both contextual and contested – in their terms, “grey” and “value-laden” – and it was this that they wanted their learners to think critically about. The teachers’ concept maps emphasised a critical orientation to social inquiry, social action, citizenship and participating in society. Similarly, in the interview discussions, they most strongly aligned ethical decision-making and action with thinking critically about viewpoints and values. Ethics was for them about understanding sides of a debate; of the sort that occur in their social studies classrooms and connected to notions of choice, rational thought and deliberation. David, for example, associated ethics with wisdom, “You know

enlightened as opposed to what’s normal, what you’d normally expect to happen. And yet you might go against the grain and that’s based on rationalization”.

The BBC and San Diego (BBC, 2014c; University of San Diego, 2014a, 2014b) web pages appeared to stimulate the teachers’ thinking about opportunities for critical reflection. For five teachers, the website content came as something of a revelation. Mia reflected that “I never knew that there were schools of thought about ethics, I never knew that, and I’ve never known that anyone had written them down and catalogued them.” Similarly, Hana reported an ‘a-ha’ moment having read about ethics in relation to the global financial crisis:

But then reading it in the Guardian and it’s a big topic, you know, with some really big people [debating the ethical issues]…I thought “gosh, we’re talking about a real hot topic here”. It was really interesting…discussing it with you and then reading it in the paper. I really felt there was some connection. I thought “oh, this is great”.

The majority of teachers could see the immediate pedagogical relevance of the website content as a support for critical reflection. Four teachers reported that one or both was helpful and accessible and, to my surprise, three reported that at least one of the web pages was sufficiently accessible for students. It was suggested that students could use the ethical perspectives outlined in the web pages to reflect their own beliefs. Alexa described this approach as: “just talk to the kids about ‘which school of thought do you think you fall into?’ Does this govern the decisions you make?’” In a variation on this, Simon felt that the students could then evaluate a situation (such as sheltering a Jew from the Nazis) from ethical stand-points. Other strategies for critical ethical reflection suggested by the teachers included the use of dilemmas, creating a court situation where jurors are assigned different perspectives, asking students to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, and the use of newspaper photographs as a stimulus for ethical debate. Simon pointed out that strategies such as these are not without their drawbacks and stressed the need to ground ethical dilemmas in context and fact. Citing an image of an Islamic woman being punished, he commented:

…you can’t actually discuss that as an ethical issue in isolation without discussing the whole propaganda brought against Muslims at the moment. You know, ethics is not in isolation, the ethical issues and the way they’re posed is very much a product of society around us.

Yet, despite seeing a strong link to critical reflection about social issues, the teachers were cautious about the extent to which ethical perspectives might be used as a tool for this. They were reluctant to take this into a deeper exploration of ethical perspectives and were hesitant about employing the conceptual language and categories of thought of the philosophy of ethics. This hesitancy manifested in the language that they drew on. Unless referring to the web pages, the teachers tended not to use the term ethical

perspectives to mean the theoretical frameworks that shape decisions about social actions. For the most part, they used ethics interchangeably with points of view, values and perspectives (by which they meant viewpoints) throughout the interviews. The semantic distance between ethics and perspectives was also evident in the concept maps

where all teachers placed ‘ethical thinking’ well apart from ‘perspectives/worldviews’, yet five located it more closely to ‘challenging the basis of assumptions and perceptions’.

For the teachers, ethical perspectives were too abstracted, in two senses. A first related to the cognitive demand they perceived ethical perspectives presented for themselves and their students. The teachers queried students’ readiness for thinking about ethical perspectives and raised the need to develop students’ critical and independent thinking skills in order to be able to tackle ethical dilemmas. One teacher also felt that clarifying ‘ethics’ may be a pedagogical challenge when the students are most used to the term values. Furthermore, how one might go about teaching theoretical perspectives was a matter of some discussion, in particular whether or not students should be taught a list of these, and where in the learning cycle it would be most appropriate to do so. It was notable that while they discussed the potential of using ethical perspectives in a lesson(s) and possibly units of work, none suggested that they might be a recurring thread in their social studies programmes. Two teachers noted that the vast and contested nature of ethics would make such an endeavour complex:

It makes it very mind-boggling to think about how you would use [ethical perspectives] in your teaching and how you would actually put it to the kids, and do it enough depth