Hello everyone,
Each of us is faced, time after time, with a variety of ethical dilemmas.
Some of the dilemmas are easy to face. When I periodically had a student offer me a bribe for a better grade, I assumed they were joking, and I joked back ("You couldn't afford me," I would say. "You have to pay triple my annual salary to cover me after I'm fired, then you have to give me the bribe, which goes up all the time because of inflation. Whoops! It just went up another half million dollars!"). If I became aware that a female student might be flirting, I simply reverted to my most formal, distancing teacher behavior and used the professional veneer to discourage her, which it did. (It's an old trick of some students to flirt for grades and privileges; I hope you never fall for it. The most incorrigible flirt will give it up if there's no benefit from it; be scrupulous about treating him/her with the most absolute fairness and the flirting ends.)
Some dilemmas are very difficult. Those are the ones I would like to consider.
The most common problem that teachers face is deciding how much of their personal beliefs will show up in the classroom. You are constantly faced with questions about your personal feelings about some issue, and you must decide--sometimes on the spur of the moment--how much to reveal. You may face lawsuits or termination under some extreme situations (proselytizing students to your religion during school hours or openly advocating anarchy are two examples). By the same token, you are probably a teacher because of what you believe, so you can't completely divorce yourself from your teachings--nor should you.
So, what do you do?
You start from the point of view that, no matter what you believe, the value and dignity of individual human beings is most important. You have both a moral and a professional responsibility to protect your students--perhaps even before you teach them. This does not mean, necessarily, that you must agree with all of the actions of your students, or that you should be willing to sacrifice an entire class of eager learners in an effort to save the dignity of a major disrupter. It simply means that you begin your decisions with the idea that all human beings are entitled to be valued have some dignity.
Beginning at that point, we can start to discuss the ethics of a series of situations that may arise in the classroom.
I propose that, for the next few days, I present a variety of classroom dilemmas, give my view on ways to work through them, and welcome your comments. Let me start with one as an example.
Premise: You hate the president.
Situation: Because of your subject matter (ie, social studies) or a question in class ("Sir, who are you going to vote for?"), the opportunity arises for you to discuss the president and his policies.
I think this is a problem even if every student in your class hates the president, too. First, you are not really allowed to poll your students, so you can never know for sure how many agree with you or not. Second, it's not good educational practice to teach your students to parrot your beliefs and not think for themselves (we used to call it "brown nosing"; it has other names--all derogatory--all deservedly so). ON the other hand, you wouldn't want a misunderstanding that led them to switch to the other side because they thought you preferred it.
If we follow the original idea that all your students have value and dignity, then the educational principle follows that they really need to learn to think for themselves in political matters.
I have said to my students, "I'm not comfortable telling you whom I will vote for until I am certain that you are comfortable thinking for yourself. Let's discuss the problem as thoroughly as we can, and then I'll see if you can guess." (That makes them evaluate what I say.)
At other times, however (depending on the overall lesson plan), I have said, "It's important for you all to know my biases in this case. I want to assure you, though, that I have in the past been perfectly willing to give good grades to people who disagree with me. In fact, I enjoy a good debate."
At other times, I will purposely play "devil's advocate," though I think it's important for the kids to find out sooner or later that that's what I'm doing. Personally, I deplore decisions that are made too simply, and teenagers are notoriously unlikely to see all the shades of possibility in an issue, so playing devil's advocate can help them.
In any of these cases, I believe it is the teacher's responsibility to make sure that full advocacy is given to every viewpoint. The difference in tactics may only be to ensure inclusion of a viewpoint that might not be there otherwise. If I hate the president, and everyone else in class seems to love him, I might state my bias straight out, thereby provoking a two-sided conversation. If I hate him, and everyone else hates him, I might play devil's advocate. If I hate him, and the rest of the class has mixed feelings about him, I may cover my feelings completely, thereby avoiding brown-nosing or any sign of favoritism. Whatever I choose to do, I strongly believe it's my responsibility to allow free expression of both sides in all their complexity. That and only that fulfills my original premise of dignity and value for all students.
We can play this game with evolution, abortion, religion, standardized testing, and on and on. If you have a specific question, bring it up. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of my biases.
Jeff Combe
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2 comments:
I believe ethics are important in the classroom and you seem to agree. First, it is wonderful that you stand behind your response to student attemps to flirt; you're teaching an important message to the girls AND boys in your classroom and I commend you.
I want to bring up the fact that todays youth are largely unaware of the workings of the political world, the importance of advocacy and grassroots politics, and are not always taught important democratic skills such as awareness of injustice, the ability to spread ideas and generate support, and other ways of implementing change. Though this can be a touchy subject I think it is important for teachers to first, have strong opinions about a properly working democracy and to educate students with ways to support and utilize a democratic society.
It is ethical to keep your biases hidden as a teacher, but to be neutral supports the status quo and more should be done to encourage children to realize that things dont have to be 'just the way it is'. A teacher could encourage children to understand their own biases, the teachers, and others' and if the teachers bias is supportive of progressive and just politics I believe it is the moral thing to do to educate rather than allow children to think what they will. Children are exposed to baises everywhere, the ideals and values of true educators are great ones and chilren should be exposed to them.
How do you feel about the infringement of curriculum on important educational goals? Is it unethical to support worthy politicians?
Rachel,
While I understand your feelings that sometimes teachers need to speak out against the status quo, I firmly believe that this is a privilege that we should exercise only very rarely. Most of the time, simply teaching your students to think using higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy will enable them to question immorality in the status quo.
If you teach social studies, it's very important for you to maintain as much political neutrality as possible, or you largely devalue your credibility. If you teach English, you have more leeway in being provocative, but you must be willing to accept the well-written essays of students who disagree with you. If you teach other subjects, I seriously question your need to involve yourself politically in front of your students.
I'm not sure how curriculum infringes on worthy educational goals. A well-constructed curriculum should help drive those goals. You would have to explain what you have in mind here.
I do not believe that it is ethical to support a political candidate, though it may, under some circumstances, be ethical to tell students whom you support. (That explanation would take a complete blog.)
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