In today’s global village we find several opposing trends. On one hand, blocs of nations—such as the European Union—are developing in order to increase the well-being of their citizens and, on the other, there is animosity between nations and groups of people, resulting in violence, terror, and war. Social processes such as cultural pluralization, secularization, globalization, emancipation, and individualization can and should have important consequences for child rearing and moral education. Individuals today have a wider choice of norms, values, ideas, and patterns of behavior. Therefore, it is increasingly important to educate youth to moral and democratic values on the personal, interpersonal, societal, cultural, and religious levels.
Changes taking place in society and in the educational system in the areas of theory, practice, and assessment have an impact on moral and democratic education as well. Haste (2002) argues that the last decade has seen a number of major changes in both theory and method in the areas of citizenship and democracy. The first concerns the distinction between stable and changing, or transitional, societies. The second concerns nationalism and democracy that are transmuted by each state through its own cultural narratives. The third comes from the dissolution of the left-right spectrum in Western democracies and the fragmentation of old ideological boundaries. A key development is the emergence of emancipatory politics, political movements that reflect the moralization of politics, driven by ideas of justice or responsibility. Greene (1998) emphasizes that the recognition of plurality and of difference makes unprecedented demands on institutions. In this context, teachers and teaching fulfill an important role in moral and democratic education. Darling-Hammond (1998) notes that what teachers know and can do is one of the most important influences on what students learn; that recruiting, preparing, and retaining good teachers is a central strategy for improving our schools; and that school reform cannot succeed unless it focuses on creating the conditions in which teachers can teach and teach well. She argues that the goal of education is to make the benefits of democracy more available and thus to make the foundations of democracy more lasting and secure.
Shepard (2000) presents a new conceptual framework encompassing new theories of curriculum, learning and assessment. She claims that to be compatible with and to support the new social-constructivist model of teaching and learning, classroom assessment must change in two fundamentally important ways: (1) its forms and content must be changed to better represent important thinking and problem-solving skills in each of the disciplines and (2) the way that assessment is used in classrooms and how it is regarded by teachers and students must change. Shepard discusses dynamic assessment ideas relating to the social mediation of learning and how students become socialized into ways of behavior in a community of practice, and become accustomed to being part of a social group. For novice and veteran teachers, this can be a productive way to learn about the resources brought by students from diverse communities. Furthermore, classroom assessment should also be used to examine and improve teaching practices. This seems to be fundamentally important to the idea of transforming the culture of the classroom.
The educational conclusions that stem from the above lead to a view of individuals as active in constructing—and in coconstructing with others—knowledge that enables them to make sense of experience, and to develop an identity in a particular social context that requires attention not only to what is believed and valued, but also to how and why.
Collaborative team processes may develop sociomoral reasoning and behavior in all participants, regardless of their individual experience. Cohen, Lotan, Abram, Scarloss, and Schultz (2002) found that groups learned because of their discussions and through the creation of group products. Learning was not a result of academic knowledge that individuals brought to a group but occurred through the exchange of ideas and willingness to be self-critical about what the group was creating; thus learning arose from the group as a whole.
All these ideas can be found in the perceptions and studies of the scholars collected in this volume. They specifically focus on moral and democratic education, and agree that reality is a suitable field for learning and experiencing moral and political perspectives and choices. Reality is complex and composed of some good and much bad, and educators need to learn how to create empowerment, utility, and efficacy from the participation of youth in negative and positive events and experiences. The salient goals of education are the development and construction of higher-order thinking, feeling, reflecting, performing, and participating competencies. This volume is directed toward this vision.
The group of researchers whose work is collected in Teaching in Moral and Democratic Education has been working together for several years and has presented at symposia of the Moral Education SIG at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and at the biannual conference of the European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI). This group represents a budding learning community examining the various aspects of moral and democratic education. According to its editors, Wiel Veugelers and Fritz Oser, the aim of the book is to educate toward “critical democratic citizenship in which students combine autonomy and critical thinking with justice and social care” (p. 7). The authors try “to combine profound theoretical foundations with empirical research that in its’ synthesis can help practitioners in their pedagogical actions” (p. 7). The theme that arises from the papers calls for citizenship in the twenty-first century that must be considered in terms of what it means to be a citizen in a global society. Citizenship education that “fosters skills, attitudes and knowledge in students, that enable them to effectively and responsibly participate in civic life” (Narvaez, Leilani, & Bock, p. 48).
The need for knowledge of values is important if we want to understand the nature of our pluralistic society, which includes people from all over the world and from all walks of life, from very different backgrounds holding very different values. In this case, we need more than information. We need examples and explanations. We need exercises, imagination and critical reflection. These come together in a rich variety of theoretical ideas and practical methods described in this book.
The book has an introduction and three parts. The introduction notes that in the Western world, people are concerned about the development of youngsters’ values. The editors hold that the “task of education, and in particular the role of teachers, is seen as crucial in preparing young people for society…. Values are interwoven in all aspects of school and teaching” (p. 7).
The first part of the book, “Learning from Morality,” focuses on values and what students might learn from them. This part includes three articles. The first, “On Becoming Moral: How Negative Experience can Inspire the Moral Person” by Fritz K. Oser, reviews ideas and experiences in the moral field. Many scholars believe that we can only learn about morality through positive justice. Only a person who lives in a just world can understand the concept of justice. When it comes to moral development, Oser holds that this belief is at least partly mistaken: good can only be known in light of its opposite, bad. The second paper, “Who Should I Become? Citizenship, Goodness, Human Flourishing, and Ethical Expertise” by Darcia Narvaez, Leilani Endicott, and Tonia Bock, focuses on tools, skills, and knowledge that moral and value education should foster. It presents the development of the Ethical Expertise (ETHEX) model and delimits its philosophical and psychological underpinnings. The third paper is “The Teacher’s Integrity” by Kirsi Tirri, who defines integrity as psychological and ethical wholeness. Teachers’ integrity is discussed through moral mistakes in schools, as identified by early education and secondary school teachers and students. The data includes teacher interviews, and teachers’ and students’ written responses. The author emphasizes the lessons learned from these mistakes.
The second part of the book, “Pedagogical Professionalism,” focuses on the role of teachers in moral and democratic education. This part includes three articles. The first is “The Quest for Teacher Professionalism: The Importance of Commitment” by Tryvge Bergem, which presents the commitment model to teacher professionalism and the concept of teaching as a moral endeavor as its fundamental element. Bergem suggests that teacher education programs should consist of studies of educational theory and practice including educational philosophy, studies of academic subjects, and studies of ethics and professional development. The second article is “Thinking about Pedagogy in Late Modernity: Child-rearing Objectives of Teachers, Student Teachers and Parents” by Cees A. Klaassen. Changes in society have resulted in considerable diversity in people’s thinking about the objectives of child-rearing. The article presents findings comparing teachers, parents, and student teachers with regard to their conceptions of the objectives of child-rearing, such as self-determination, social sensitivity, and conformity. The last article in this section is “Collaborative Action Research and Social Role Taking” by Sharon Nodie Oja. It focuses on how sustained participation in action research changed teachers’ conceptual complexity, empathy, and perspective. Oja concludes that action research is a democratic process that teaches community, and can stimulate the moral, conceptual, and interpersonal development of teachers.
The third part of the book, “School Development,” focuses on the development of moral and democratic education in schools. This part includes three articles. The first is “Implementing ‘Just and Caring Communities’ in Elementary Schools: A Deweyan Perspective” by Wolfgang Althof. Althof presents an implemented program of “Just and Caring communities” as an integration of Deweyen thought and developmental oriented approaches pursuant to Kohlberg’s social and moral learning in schools. He presents the theoretical multifaceted background, the program activities, and the effects measured. The second article is “Teachers Evaluate the Moral Development of their Students” by Maria Rosa Buxarrais, Miquel Martinez, Elana Noguera, and Amelia Tey. The researchers describe the process of constructing a scale to evaluate the moral development of students. Teacher participated in formulating distinctive items for each level of education. The measurement focuses on concrete behavior in schools. The third article, “Moral and Democratic Education in Secondary Schools,” by Wiel Veugelers and Ewoud de Kat, presents findings of an empirical study that dealt with central educational issues. These include the relationship between self-regulated learning and the moral and pedagogical task of the secondary school; the possibilities for a more social and democratic way of learning and its constraints; and the influence of the school’s educational philosophy.
The articles in the book relate to three upheavals that occurred in education at the end of the twentieth century and which redouble the importance of this book: (1) A multidimensional and eclectic approach to the definition and theories of values, morals, and democracy; (2) A change in theories of learning, from theories of transmission of knowledge to constructivist theories; and from a monastic theoretical approach toward educational objectives, to multivariated and multidimensional approaches; (3) Changes in educational goals that offer alternatives, and in the design of the processes of instruction, learning and assessment, as well as in the role of the teacher, whose moral role as a professional has grown in importance. Reflection on these changes is apparent throughout the book.
Multifaceted and Multivariated Integrated Approaches to Values and Moral Education
The authors chose to combine different theoretical and educational approaches in order to design eclectic models which integrate approaches to multifaceted and multivariated models. Buxarrais, Martinez, Noguera, and Tey include perspectives such as the Kohlbergian approach, the clarification of values approach, theories of social learning, philosophical perspectives such as those of Habermas and Rawls, and neo-Kohlbergian approaches.
Oser presents the progress of the developmental approaches from Piaget and Kohlberg that dealt with cognition and sociomoral cognition in the 1960s and 1970s, to the care, empathy, procedural morality, and moral courage following Noddings, Turiel, Nucci, Damon, Hart, Colby and Althof. He argues that “the discussion of education practice became more and more eclectic in the sense, that values and content, judgment and knowledge, action and emotions were seen as necessary parts of any new moral education” (p. 16). Oser takes the reader on a fascinating historical voyage through the culture of the Western world and presents a rich world of sources from various cultures, among them Korczak, Maimonides, and the Bible, as well as the approaches of Greek philosophers including Socrates and Plato and modern philosophers including Kant and Arendt, among others.
Narvaez, Leilani, and Bock base their chapter on the work of diverse scholars and researchers in their model of character education: (1) common understandings of what it means to be good; (2) conclusions from social sciences about what helps humans thrive; (3) the consensus among leaders worldwide on the necessary characteristics of a citizen in the twenty-first century; and (4) up-to-date knowledge of how humans learn.
Advocating a constructivist approach to development and education, Althof based his and Oser’s model of “Just and Caring Communities” in elementary schools on integration among Dewey’s assumptions on the relationship of education and school to society and individual abilities; the features of Kohlberg’s “Just Community” approach and developmentally oriented approaches; and on Dalton and Watson’s social and moral learning motivation in schools.
Klaassen relates to child rearing goals. He makes a distinction between value orientations of self-determination versus conformity according to Kohn’s socioeconomic differences and adds the categories of developing social sensitivity and competencies of sociomoral thinking and communicating values and norms according to Oser and Power, Higgins and Kohlberg. In addition, he examined the acquisition of the virtues propagated by the character education approach.
These examples illustrate the new approaches to value and moral education, which utilize the entire spectrum of theoretical approaches, historical and cultural knowledge and interdisciplinary discoveries to promote value education, and motivation for moral thinking and behavior.
Multiple Goals of Education and Diverse Methods to Achieve Them
The papers integrate the theoretical with the practical in the classroom, the school and the community, using various configurations of teaching, learning, and assessment methods.
The educational goals of developing a moral personality and the didactic and procedural strategies to develop it at school are identified by Buxarrais, Martinez, Noguera, and Tey: self-regulation and autonomy, self-knowledge, social habits, dialogic habits, moral reasoning, capacity to transform the context, and empathy and social perspective. The unique direction in this paper is the application of formative evaluation as part of the educational process, and the DMP questionnaire that provides profiles of development.
Oser concentrates on moral progress and the systems needed to achieve it. He argues that negative moral knowledge acts as protection for correct moral behavior. Negative moral knowledge is internally processed knowledge that consciously maintains the tension between a standard and the violation of the standard. According to Oser, “a sanction as a negative experience of a moral mistake is a form of protection for the standard” (p. 36). Several ways to use negative moral knowledge for moral development that he raises are the mirror image as accumulated in the experiences of others, and transmitted through stories and tales; the literature of fairy tales, novels, films, and religious writings.
The ETHEX model presented by Narvaez, Endicott, and Bock addresses character education and promotes ethical processes and skills directed to practical reasoning and functional ethics. The process category has four stages: ethical sensitivity, ethical judgment, ethical motivation and ethical action. Students learn what knowledge to apply, when, and why ETHEX articulates a set of strategies for developing moral expertise.
Veguelers and de Kat’s conceptualization of pedagogical goals integrates five domains of education: moral education, personal education, social education, critical thinking, and discipline. Changes in the nonacademic achievement of pedagogical goals like values, moral and social behavior and motivation are integrated into academic achievements. Their conceptualization combines the goals of education into a multifaceted system, based on an integrated theoretical approach. Parallel developments are seen in changes in academic sociomoral goals, according to changes in learning theories toward the cognitive and constructivist approaches, and reforms in the vision of curriculum, classroom instruction and assessment.
The Moral Dimensions of the Teacher as a Professional
In most of the articles in this volume, the teacher has a very important role in educating, promoting, developing, and constructing moral and democratic students and preparing them to cope with a global society.
One of the central premises of the model discussed in Bergem’s chapter is understanding teaching as a moral endeavor. He based his ideas on the assumption that teaching is a professional activity deeply implicated in ethical concerns and considerations. Because of developments in society, teachers have more responsibility and the scope of the teacher’s task has expanded. Bergem presents the commitment model in which teachers are moral agents. The overall aim of teacher education of prospective and practicing teachers should be to become committed teachers who work as professionals to the benefit of the individual child as well as for their parents and society. The teachers need broad educational competence, solid academic competence and reflected ethical competence.
Tirri accepts Bergem’s idea of the moral nature of teaching and brings vivid examples of teachers’ integrity. She argues that in dilemma situations, teachers search for their own integrity as professionals and as people, and the dilemmas allow teachers to learn from their own moral mistakes. In her chapter, Tirri discusses teachers’ integrity through moral mistakes in school as identified by early education and secondary school teachers and students. This wide scope enables us to reflect on the moral lessons learned from mistakes. The findings correspond to Oser’s model and confirm the ideas that are expressed in Bergem’s paper.
The uniqueness of the book is the result of the high level of the scholars who contributed to it, each one an expert in his or her field, with vast knowledge and experience who has, in the past, implemented this knowledge in creative and multidimensional ways. Comparison between the works presented in this book and prior works shows open-mindedness to change and to new personal challenges, both theoretical and practical. Some chapters present a theoretical, methodical survey from which are drawn the conclusions; others are based on many years of personal experience; and still others combine both. The authors relate to diverse international sources in areas of philosophy, psychology, sociology, pedagogy and literature, written by scholars from countries with a variety of traditions and attitudes toward democracy and human rights. This wealth of sources and testimonials gives readers an intellectual and emotional experience that increases their knowledge, curiosity, and motivation and positively influences their awareness in general. The authors of the papers combine multifaceted definitions of current theories with an eclectic grasp of concepts of moral values and democracy.
The topic of the book, the education of citizens toward a democratic society, is without a doubt an important one, not only from a theoretical-philosophical point of view, but first and foremost, from a practical-pedagogical one. The book places the teacher and his/her obligations in the forefront. This is important for the professional empowerment of prospective and practicing teachers, who are among the target audience. The book provides descriptions of up-to-date methods of teaching, learning, and assessment in education to moral and democratic values. The chapters include a wealth of clear and vivid examples that can be implemented in different countries, which turn the abstract and the theoretical into real-life pedagogic pictures, enabling the reader to participate in the teaching experiences presented.
Reading through the different sections one can detect different kinds of writing on different dimensions. There is academic writing, with references to the literature as well as personal accounts of experience. This is to the book’s merit, for all of this needs to be heard in the debate about education to values and moral citizenship. There are papers that relate to quantitative and qualitative research. The presentation of previous theories and research combined with examples from the field and from the personal experience of the researchers, make reading the book an interesting, impressive and exciting experience. The book is successful in its attempt to clarify the term “moral and democratic education,” and the way it is approached in different countries. The text is accessible and demonstrates much tolerance for the ideas and views of various social and cultural groups.
What is perhaps lacking is an essay which can bring these papers together as a fabric providing an integrated whole and a unified theoretical basis for approaching the area of moral and democratic education.
Epilogue
I would like to conclude this review with some personal remarks that grew out of an accumulation of my students’ assignments waiting on my desk for my evaluation. They reflect the contribution and efficacy that Teaching in Moral and Democratic Education could have to the professional development of academic scholars, teacher educators, novice and veteran teachers, and students on all levels. The book combines new ideas for teaching values, morality, and democracy and provides materials that are lacking in higher education today.
I teach a graduate workshop called “The Moral Roles of the Teacher.” My students are experienced practicing teachers doing their MA. The workshop curriculum includes learning and experiencing two approaches to moral education: The sociomoral cognitive developmental approach and the character education approach. The students are asked to present examples that stem from their past and present school experience. The workshop enables the students to experience these approaches to moral education on three levels: (1) acquiring and constructing knowledge, as students; (2) as teachers, transmitting the material to their pupils; and (3) as part of a professional community, transmitting the ideas to their peers in their schools. The final assignment requires the students to describe an actual dilemma, to analyze it theoretically and select practical ways of coping with it, as well as metacognitive reflection on the process. This project serves as a formative stage in the teachers’ professional enrichment. I would like to quote from a number of these assignments, and show how they point to the need for this book, its importance and its role in empowering users. The points the students raised relate to all three levels mentioned above.
“I have been a teacher for more than 20 years, and I’ve always focused on value education and taken in-service training programs. In spite of this experience, this course and its bibliography exposed me to more points of view, ways of coping, and means of assessment, and opened my mind to knowledge with which I was not acquainted, and through which I investigated new aspects of my roles as an educator and as a human being.” Another student wrote: “I felt professional empowerment. Sometimes we act intuitively, but as a result of the workshop and exposure to the educational models, I feel, for the first time in my career, that I am dealing with this topic as a professional.”
One student wrote: “During the course, I experienced a real dilemma regarding theft with my third grade class and I applied the material I learned to coping with it in the classroom.” Another wrote: “The most significant gain from the workshop was the strengthening of my awareness and sensitivity to values and to different points of view that we face all the time, but don’t know how to deal with.”
“Now I present these contents and methods to other teachers in my school and we are compiling ‘a culture bag’ for our school community.” Another teacher wrote that she was giving a minicourse to other teachers at her school, and another wrote that she was preparing a program for kindergarten. The teachers felt that the workshop helped them on both the personal and the professional level, and motivated them to initiate learning experiences and programs for dealing with moral and democratic issues.
These students’ comments show the need for this book in a course like mine. The book’s emphases on learning from negative morality, looking at debates and dilemmas from diverse and multivariate viewpoints, constructing critical thinking, integrating several theories and kinds of practice when dealing with sociomoral and democratic dilemmas, as well as the cycle of teaching-learning-assessing, and professional empowerment, are exactly what teachers grappling with moral education can take with them into the classroom.
The vision of constructing moral and democratic literacy together with learning the 3 R’s is a message that stems from the articles in this book. Hargreaves, Earl, and Schmidt (2002) examine classroom assessment reform from four perspectives: technological, political, and cultural (following House, 1981), and postmodern. The technological perspective focuses on issues of organization, structure, strategy, and skill in developing educational reform. The cultural perspective examines how educational reforms are interpreted and integrated into the social and cultural context of schools. The political perspective views educational reforms as being embedded in the dynamics of power and control in human interaction. Problems are caused by inappropriate use, political and bureaucratic inference, or institutional priorities and requirements. The postmodern perspective “is based on the view that in today’s complex and uncertain world, human beings are not completely knowable and that ‘authentic’ experiences are fundamentally questionable” (pp. 69-70). These four perspectives are implemented in the articles in this book and represent a beginning of educational reform in all four areas. The rich collection of academic discourse on a significant, contemporary problem—the study of morality, values and democracy—opens a window to the substantive dialogue taking place among scholars representing various fields of study. Teaching in Moral and Democratic Education, edited by Veugelers and Oser, is worth reading, studying and implementing.
