| dc.description.abstract | Teachers make complex ethical decisions as part of their daily practice. These decisions are shaped by the classrooms and institutional environments in which teachers work, involve their core professional values, and have implications for political theories of justice. However, the nature of this decision-making isn’t well understood, and thus rarely discussed in teacher professional learning and policy development. This dissertation opens the black box of teachers’ ethical decision-making with three papers that use “empirically-engaged philosophy” to theorize, illustrate, and suggest supports for teachers’ ethical decision-making in American K-12 schools.
The first paper analyzes how the spatial and social environment of the classroom shapes teachers’ ethical decision-making. I draw from classroom ethnography, philosophy of education, and teacher practice literatures to develop an accessible theory of how the characteristics of the “crowded classroom” create challenges and affordances for teachers’ decision-making. In the bounded physical space of the classroom, diverse and developing groups of students interact with their teacher in close proximity under temporal pressures. Teachers must consider their decisions’ ethical consequences through time and space, and how to work together with students to resolve ethical challenges.
The second paper is a qualitative study of the ethical reasoning of 149 teachers working in a large city district where mitigating systemic injustices through individual decision-making is a feature of everyday practice. I analyze how these experienced teachers reason through a “normative case study in educational ethics” (NCS) that presents an ethical dilemma of the tradeoff between systems-level policy implementation and individual student need. My findings provide a rare illustration of phronesis (practical wisdom) and discretion in teacher policy implementation. In contrast to the techno-rational decision-making assumed by the USA K-12 education system, teachers’ ethical reasoning in this case was individually-focused, holistic, and flexible.
Given these findings, paper three examines how to support teachers’ ethical decision-making through professional development. Data from the same PD experience suggests that when teachers receive the time, space, and scaffolding to consider the values at the core of their practice, they can develop new understandings of how those values connect to larger systems and improve their ability and willingness to articulate and share them with colleagues. Ultimately, values-based PD—specifically NCS PD—may be able to support individual and school-wide ethical decision-making that is responsive to teachers’ complex contexts. | |
