Blowin' about the tops: How a university teacher experiences and negotiates the ethics of teaching

Abstract

Teaching is an inherently ethical activity. The act of teaching necessarily involves teachers making decisions about what is right for their students’ intellectual, physical, spiritual and moral development. While the title “educational ethicist” is commonly associated with scholars of moral and educational philosophy, I suggest all those who teach need to understand themselves as educational ethicists. This thesis is an account of my “becoming” an educational ethicist as I experience and negotiate the ethics of teaching. In Part 1 of the thesis I am becoming a scholarly and researching educational ethicist. I begin to explore the question of how teachers make ethical decisions and the place a code of ethics plays in this process. A review of the literature reveals that, while there is a body of research that explores ethical decision-making processes, there is a paucity of scholarship on the place of codes in the decision-making process. A small-scale study of the nature of ethical dilemmas experienced by student teachers on practicum provides insights into why certain types of ethical dilemmas emerged for the participants and how they managed these dilemmas. By the conclusion of Part 1, I am becoming an activist educational ethicist as I engage in recent national policy debates around professionalism and the ethics of teaching in New Zealand. My frustration at not being able to gain an authentic sense of how teachers experience the ethics of teaching through empirical research with others resulted in a methodological turn in Part 2 of the thesis. I redefine what it means to become a researching educational ethicist by turning towards critical autoethnography to explore the ethical nature of teaching. In this process, I am becoming a theorising and reflective educational ethicist. I reframe my research question to: how does a university teacher experience and negotiate the ethics of teaching? In researching this question, I blend Laurel Richardson’s “writing as a method of inquiry” with John Smyth’s model of “critical reflection” to interrogate my ethical decision making as a university teacher. This decision making is re-created as lived narratives that are analysed through a theoretical framework of teacher identity construction, to reveal the complexity of interwoven issues of oppression and empowerment, agency and structure, and the ethics of teaching. My framework draws on teacher life-history research, sociocultural theory and Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation to provide critical insights into how a university teacher experiences and negotiates the ethics of teaching. I find that experiencing and negotiating those ethics is an act of continual identity construction and reconstruction within the dilemmatic world of the neoliberal university. This thesis shows, intimately, how I am continually becoming an educational ethicist and provides rich theoretical insights into the process of teacher identity construction.