Academic staff owe a duty of fidelity to uphold institutional standards of integrity. They also have their own values and conceptions of integrity as well as personal responsibilities and commitments. The question of how academic practitioners address or reconcile conflicting values and responsibilities has been underexplored in the literature.…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore doctoral candidates' ethical work in writing the acknowledgements section of their theses. With interest in the formation of academic identities/subjectivities, the authors explore acknowledgements writing as always potentially a form of parrhesia or risky truth-telling, through which the candidate places…

Family or kinship affects how we make decisions including those of an ethical nature. Research has shown that family is an important component and influencer for First Generation College Students. The influence of family spans the globe from the United States to various international locations. This study replicates a previous study on kinship and…

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese students studying in doctoral and postgraduate programmes outside of China numbered over 600,000 (2017). A number of these students may return to China to gather data. This article explores tensions between compliance with the bounds of formal ethical approval and further research opportunities that may…

Educational psychologists face challenging decisions around ethical dilemmas to uphold the rights of all children. Due to finite government resources for supporting all learners, one of the roles of educational psychologists is to apply for this funding on behalf of schools and children. Tensions can emerge when unintended ethical dilemmas arise…

The world is changing, but political and educational institutions appears to be stuck in the 19th century. Modern policy and education are both premised on an Enlightenment assumption of the human, rational, individual subject. Increasingly, elements of these philosophical premises are being interrogated. The critique emerges from the…

Infant and toddler specialists working in Aotearoa (New Zealand) face an ethically complex question when the government requests an assessment of children from indigenous Maori culture. In this article, the authors explore the question: "Is it ethical to undertake parenting assessments and act as expert witnesses in cases which may result in…

There is a rational assumption built into some research projects that policy contexts are influenced by the quality of the evidence. This is, at best, only somewhat true some of the time. Through policy ethnographies, two education researchers working in the context of sustainability discuss their experiences with evidence-based policy. Central to…

Laura Stark's ethnography of IRB decision-making unearthed two concerns: first, even though the committees were governed by ethical principles, the committees generated their own precedents for future decision-making; second, Stark witnessed unequal power relations within committee decision-making as a member's expertise was accepted as a…

Ethical considerations are inherent to programme design decision-making, but not normally explicit. Nonetheless, they influence whose interests are served in a programme and who benefits from it. This paper presents an analysis of ethical considerations made by programme design practitioners in the context of a polytechnic in Aotearoa/New Zealand.…

Worldwide, there is a growing expectation that teachers will act in a "professional" manner. Professionalism, in this regard, includes identification of a unique body of occupational knowledge, adherence to desirable standards of behaviour, processes to hold members to account and commitment to what the profession regards as morally…

Ethical review is an integral part of the process of developing research and considering issues associated with the production of knowledge. It is part of a system that primarily legitimises western traditions of inquiry and reinforces western assumptions about knowledge and its benefit to society. Around the world the process of colonisation has…

Some crucial issues in visual research involving children in schools are examined: the contradictions between the current widespread practice of visual recordings in public and private spheres and the cautious approach adopted in educational research; the dominance of adults and text in school research despite technology providing accessible ways…

Ethical and legal issues involving provision of medical treatment to seriously ill handicapped persons are considered. Legislation and court cases (in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand) on withholding treatment from seriously ill infants are reviewed. It is concluded that the presence of handicap does not justify withholding treatment.…