This study investigated the process and the products of negotiation in the ethical conflicts of teaching, focusing on the ethical conflicts experienced by early education teachers. Participants included urban kindergarten and elementary school teachers from several Finnish public day care centers and schools. The study examined various categories…

This paper discusses teachers' moral mistakes, using data from 59 teacher interviews, 26 teacher written responses, and 98 ninth grade student written responses. Teachers and students described incidents in their schools that made them reflect on the moral nature of the situation. The most common moral dilemmas in schools related to teacher…

Stages of moral reasoning through which children develop, as researched by developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, are outlined in the introduction of this paper. The six stages are defined and exemplified by the moral issue of the value of human life. The developmental model, as it is argued, is suitable for instruction in…

Findings of a study that examined the nature of moral and ethical conflict and accommodation within the schools are presented in this paper, which introduces the conceptual framework of a larger empirical study in progress. The study attempted to: (1) describe the ethical conflict and moral dilemmas faced by teachers and principals; and (2)…

The Rating Ethical Content System (RECS) was developed for adults, but the question remains whether children can recognize moral themes in media with the same competency as adults. The current study aims to test a modified version of the existing scale (RECS-K) for use by children in order to determine whether children can recognize ethical…

To show that there are crucial assumptions of the cognitive-developmental approach to moral education made about the nature of moral reasoning which may not be warranted, sixty public school students randomly selected from two middle schools and two high schools, were interviewed on twelve different dilemmas. Transcripts of the interviews,…

This paper examines the appropriateness of the case study approach, commonly used in medical and law schools, for prospective and inservice teachers in schools of education. Developing courses in which case studies would be used to illustrate moral dilemmas would aid teachers in examining their ethical principles, weighing moral issues, and…

This study examines the role of individual differences in categorizing or domain placing social situations as entailing or not entailing moral harm in accounting for occurrences of everyday moral incidents. It was hypothesized that (1) much of what is experienced as morally injurious in everyday social events between significant others stems from…