In this section I share some data from a study my colleagues and I conducted in an Intensive English Program (IEP) at a midwestern university in the United States. (Johnston, Juhász, Marken, & Ruiz, 1998). In this study we examined transcripts from the classes of three ESL teachers for moments of moral significance. I mentioned above that in English language teaching (ELT) very little empirical research has been published looking at the moral dimensions of classroom discourse. In fact, to the best of my knowledge the study I will describe here was the first of its kind. However, my colleagues and I were very fortunate to have access to comparable work in general education. We were particularly influenced by a book by Philip Jackson, Robert Boostrom, and David Hansen (1993) entitled The Moral Life of Schools. This book describes the results of a 2.5-year study involving intensive observation and analysis of classroom interaction in a variety of public and private schools and focusing on the teacher’s role as moral agent. On the basis of their observations and analysis, Jackson et al. proposed eight “categories of moral influence” (p. 2), which fall into two sets. The first set involves overt reference to moral principles, of the kind associated with the “teaching of morality”: teachers exhorting children to behave in particular ways, posters with motivational slogans, and so on. The second set of categories of moral influence, on the other hand, constitute the “morality of teaching”; they are the ways in which the processes of education in general, and the actions of teachers in particular, send subtle, implicit moral messages in and of themselves. Jackson et al. proposed three such categories: (a) classroom rules and regulations, (b) the curricular substructure, and (c) expressive morality (pp. 11–42). The rules and regulations “deemed to be essential for the conduct and well-being of the [class]room’s inhabitants” (p. 12) include rules of conduct such as how to ask questions or participate in classroom events. Jackson et al. (1993) suggested that such rules come close “to constituting an explicit moral code that all of the students in the room are expected to obey” (p. 12). The curricular substructure comprises “conditions that operate to sustain and facilitate every teaching session in every school in every subject within the curriculum” (Jackson et al., 1993, pp. 15–16). These condi-tions thus underlie the form and content of curricula in different subjects. According to Jackson et al. (1993), these conditions have two outstanding qualities: they are “seldom explicitly acknowledged by either teachers or students” (p. 16), and they are imbued with moral meaning. The curricular substructure can be thought of as “enabling conditions” (p. 16). Jackson et al. described them as “an elaborate amalgam of shared understandings, beliefs, assumptions, and presuppositions, all of which enable the participants in a teaching situation to interact amicably with each other and work together, thus freeing them to concentrate on the task at hand” (p. 16). They include the assumption of truthfulness—that what teachers and students say in class is true—and the assumption of worthwhileness—that there is inherent value in the topics and materials covered in class. Expressive morality describes the often extremely subtle ways in which moral judgments about what is good and bad, right and wrong, are conveyed in the classroom. Expressive morality resides not just in the words teachers use but also in their tone of voice, in their facial expressions and gestures, and in elements such as the arrangement of hairs in the classroom or the decor on the walls. Jackson et al. (1993) wrote of “vaporlike emanations of character” (p. 34) that carry moral meaning and described moral judgments as being “embedded” (p. 35) in actions and objects. The act of analysis consists of a sensitization to the particular moral meanings inherent in these emanations.
Because this set of categories emerged from long and careful observation of classrooms, we decided that it would provide a very useful way of framing our own study. Thus, we used this set of three categories of moral influence as our conceptual framework. In the rest of this section I share some examples of classroom data illustrating each of the categories and discuss the moral meanings that we found to be encoded in the discourse.
More please. I am waiting