The reason I tell this story now is to show what I mean by the contextually dependent nature of moral decision making in teaching. If I had acted according to the university regulations—which from a moral standpoint represent a way of treating all students equally—or if I had followed the ethical guidelines relating to plagiarism, I would not have given Hae-young an extra chance. I did what I did because from all that I could see, Hae-young’s failure to write in the required manner was due not to laziness or a desire to deceive but to a genuine ignorance of U.S. academic expectations. (Pennycook [1996] has laid these issues out very clearly in an article published since the incident with Hae- young took place.) I made a moral decision to give her some leeway because I saw it as an educational opportunity, a chance for her to learn those expectations. For me, the educational value of leading Hae-young to this understanding outweighed the value of
fairness in dealing with all students equally. In doing what I did, I had to accept that Hae- young could develop only from where she was and that to help her I had to practice what Noddings (1984) called motivational displacement: the ability “to see the other’s reality as a possibility for my own” (p. 14). In this, I had to accept that the problem could not be fixed by merely rewriting but had to be reached organically by Hae-young herself—a process that took us far beyond the limits of the 15 weeks that the academy had laid out for learning to occur. I believe my decision was the right one; but it could be made only by taking into account all that I knew of Hae-young as a person and the nature of our educational relation in the class concerned, that is, the “uniqueness of human encounters.” No abstract principle—for example, about how to handle plagiarism—could have led me to do what I did.
To return to the discussion about the nature of morality in teaching, the story of Hae- young brings me to a point I have already mentioned and that I think is illustrated in this story: In the decision-making processes of teaching, somewhere along the road rationality ceases to operate effectively. While many attempts at a rational morality have been made by philosophers (e.g., Gert, 1988, 1998), decisions and actions are motivated ultimately not by reason alone but also by beliefs held by individuals that cannot be based in or justified by reason alone. I call these kinds of belief faith, because they are based on a kind of trust we have in our own instincts, often bolstered by our personal experiences but rarely in the certainty that, for example, scientific knowledge can bring. For instance, in my own teaching I am rather lax about deadlines: I rarely if ever penalize students for handing in written work late, so long as they let me know that they
have to do so. I am not aware of any research literature that suggests that my practice (or the opposite, i.e., being strict about deadlines) has any influence one way or the other on students’ learning. I do what I do because, for a variety of reasons, I believe it is the right thing to do. I believe that students’ time and nervous energy are best spent producing a good paper rather than worrying about a usually artificial deadline, and I do not see my role as preparing teachers for expectations beyond the university (where deadlines are in many cases also routinely missed), but rather follow Dewey in seeing what we do in our own educational setting as being of value in itself and not merely a preparation for something else. However, I have no absolute authority to which I can turn to prove that the way I believe in is in fact the right and good way to deal with students. It may be that I am doing them a disservice by not being stricter In fact, I think that it is impossible ever to know objectively whether I am right. I only have my own faith that I am doing the right thing.
This is the kind of educational belief I am talking about. In fact, much of what I (and, I think, others too) do as a teacher is grounded in certain beliefs that cannot be reached by reason. In this lie both the importance and the danger of acknowledging the centrality of morality in teaching: We recognize that our deepest and best instincts as teachers arise from belief or faith rather than from pure logic, yet by the same token we are deprived of the best tool we have for evaluating those instincts. This is a fundamental dilemma that informs all debate on morality in social settings such as teaching. Furthermore, as my colleague Cary Buzzelli and I have pointed out (Buzzelli & Johnston, 2002), in educational contexts (as in others) morality has two other
characteristics. First, it is highly complex: Even if we assumed that the morality of a particular individual is a reasonably straightforward thing (which it most certainly is not), in any given classroom the teacher is dealing not just with her own moral values but those of 20 or 30 other individuals, who are often themselves in the midst of moral growth and moral confusion. Second, in the overwhelming majority of cases it is run through with ambiguity. Teaching as an occupation involves constant rapid decision making. Many, if not most, of those decisions are moral in nature (e.g., the decision made by Peter, and the decisions I made with regard to Hae-young). However, these decisions are rarely if ever clear-cut; we rarely if ever have sufficient information to be completely sure of our decision, for the simple reason that no amount of information is ever enough. Indeed, in most morally ambiguous situations more information often clouds the issue even further. The simple decision of which students to devote one’s special attention to is a moral decision, but it is also a moral dilemma. Spending time with a student is in most cases a good thing, yet to spend time with one student is not to spend it with others, and since the teacher’s time, energy, and resources are always limited, the decision of which students
need more attention is a moral one of determining whose need is the greatest and even how need is to be determined.
In this book, then, I interpret morality as the interplay between our personal, inner beliefs about what is right and wrong and good and bad (beliefs that are often, but not always, influenced by sociocultural values) and the social situations in which those beliefs play out. That is, morality is both individual (cognitive) and cultural (social) in nature. Furthermore, morality is deeply affected by context and at all times is both complex and ambiguous.
fairness in dealing with all students equally. In doing what I did, I had to accept that Hae- young could develop only from where she was and that to help her I had to practice what Noddings (1984) called motivational displacement: the ability “to see the other’s reality as a possibility for my own” (p. 14). In this, I had to accept that the problem could not be fixed by merely rewriting but had to be reached organically by Hae-young herself—a process that took us far beyond the limits of the 15 weeks that the academy had laid out for learning to occur. I believe my decision was the right one; but it could be made only by taking into account all that I knew of Hae-young as a person and the nature of our educational relation in the class concerned, that is, the “uniqueness of human encounters.” No abstract principle—for example, about how to handle plagiarism—could have led me to do what I did.
To return to the discussion about the nature of morality in teaching, the story of Hae- young brings me to a point I have already mentioned and that I think is illustrated in this story: In the decision-making processes of teaching, somewhere along the road rationality ceases to operate effectively. While many attempts at a rational morality have been made by philosophers (e.g., Gert, 1988, 1998), decisions and actions are motivated ultimately not by reason alone but also by beliefs held by individuals that cannot be based in or justified by reason alone. I call these kinds of belief faith, because they are based on a kind of trust we have in our own instincts, often bolstered by our personal experiences but rarely in the certainty that, for example, scientific knowledge can bring. For instance, in my own teaching I am rather lax about deadlines: I rarely if ever penalize students for handing in written work late, so long as they let me know that they
have to do so. I am not aware of any research literature that suggests that my practice (or the opposite, i.e., being strict about deadlines) has any influence one way or the other on students’ learning. I do what I do because, for a variety of reasons, I believe it is the right thing to do. I believe that students’ time and nervous energy are best spent producing a good paper rather than worrying about a usually artificial deadline, and I do not see my role as preparing teachers for expectations beyond the university (where deadlines are in many cases also routinely missed), but rather follow Dewey in seeing what we do in our own educational setting as being of value in itself and not merely a preparation for something else. However, I have no absolute authority to which I can turn to prove that the way I believe in is in fact the right and good way to deal with students. It may be that I am doing them a disservice by not being stricter In fact, I think that it is impossible ever to know objectively whether I am right. I only have my own faith that I am doing the right thing.
This is the kind of educational belief I am talking about. In fact, much of what I (and, I think, others too) do as a teacher is grounded in certain beliefs that cannot be reached by reason. In this lie both the importance and the danger of acknowledging the centrality of morality in teaching: We recognize that our deepest and best instincts as teachers arise from belief or faith rather than from pure logic, yet by the same token we are deprived of the best tool we have for evaluating those instincts. This is a fundamental dilemma that informs all debate on morality in social settings such as teaching. Furthermore, as my colleague Cary Buzzelli and I have pointed out (Buzzelli & Johnston, 2002), in educational contexts (as in others) morality has two other
characteristics. First, it is highly complex: Even if we assumed that the morality of a particular individual is a reasonably straightforward thing (which it most certainly is not), in any given classroom the teacher is dealing not just with her own moral values but those of 20 or 30 other individuals, who are often themselves in the midst of moral growth and moral confusion. Second, in the overwhelming majority of cases it is run through with ambiguity. Teaching as an occupation involves constant rapid decision making. Many, if not most, of those decisions are moral in nature (e.g., the decision made by Peter, and the decisions I made with regard to Hae-young). However, these decisions are rarely if ever clear-cut; we rarely if ever have sufficient information to be completely sure of our decision, for the simple reason that no amount of information is ever enough. Indeed, in most morally ambiguous situations more information often clouds the issue even further. The simple decision of which students to devote one’s special attention to is a moral decision, but it is also a moral dilemma. Spending time with a student is in most cases a good thing, yet to spend time with one student is not to spend it with others, and since the teacher’s time, energy, and resources are always limited, the decision of which students
need more attention is a moral one of determining whose need is the greatest and even how need is to be determined.
In this book, then, I interpret morality as the interplay between our personal, inner beliefs about what is right and wrong and good and bad (beliefs that are often, but not always, influenced by sociocultural values) and the social situations in which those beliefs play out. That is, morality is both individual (cognitive) and cultural (social) in nature. Furthermore, morality is deeply affected by context and at all times is both complex and ambiguous.
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