PROFESSIONAL ETHICS EDUCATION FOR FUTURE TEACHERS: A

NARRATIVE REVIEW OF THE SCHOLARLY WRITINGS

Journal of Moral Education

Bruce Maxwella
a
University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, Canada. Corresponding author. Department of
Educational Sciences, University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières, R-2036, 3351 Des Forges,
Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada G9A 5H7. Telephone: (819) 398-5011 extension 3846.
Email: bruce.maxwell@uqtr.ca

Marina Schwimmerb
b
McGill University. Room 244, Education Building, 3700 McTavish Street, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada H3A 1Y2. Email: meschwi2002@yahoo.fr

Abstract
This article provides a narrative review of the scholarly writings on professional ethics
education for future teachers. Against the background of a widespread belief among
scholars working in this area that longstanding and sustained research and reflection on
the ethics of teaching have had little impact on the teacher education curriculum, the
article takes stock of the field by synthesizing viewpoints on key aspect aspects of
teaching ethics to teacher candidates—the role ethics plays in teacher education, the
primary objectives of ethics education for teachers, recommended teaching and learning
strategies, and challenges to introducing ethics curriculum—and maps out how opinions
on these matters have evolved over the three decades since the initial publication of
Strike and Soltis’ seminal book, The ethics of teaching. In light of the review’s results,
the paper identifies critical deficits in this literature and proposes a set of
recommendations for future inquiry.

Keywords
 1

professional ethics, ethics in teaching, literature review, teacher education, teacher

professionalism
As any historian of teacher education can readily confirm, preparing future
teachers to assume the role of moral models for their students was a primary concern of
teacher education in Europe and North America from the beginning of formalized teacher
education. Traditionally, teacher educators were very much preoccupied with impressing
on prospective teachers the need to adhere to strict moral standards for their behavior as
much in their private lives as in their work with children and young people in schools.
This aspect of teacher education began to recede to the background as teacher education
was brought under the auspices of the university through the middle decades of the 20 th
century (Labaree, 2008). In the 1980s, however, two discourses in teacher education
appeared to converge, making it clear to many that a renewed prioritization of the ethical
and moral dimensions of teaching in teacher education was urgent, if not a forgone
conclusion.
The first discourse, widely associated with Alan Tom’s (1984) book Teaching as
a Moral Craft, centered on the idea that “the act of teaching is moral” in the sense that
education inevitably involves attempting to transform people in ways that are considered
to be good or worthwhile (cf. Peters, 1966). What incited Tom (1984) and subsequent
scholars (e.g., Fenstermacher, 2001; Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik, 1990; Hansen 2001) to
explore in this direction was a concern about the future of teacher education. In a critique
that still seems fresh today, Tom (1980) argued that the increasingly dominant “applied-
science metaphor” of teaching highlighted the technical and analytic aspects of teaching
while rendering obscure to those involved in teacher education that teaching is
necessarily as much about transmitting values and social ideals as it is about transmitting
knowledge and skills.
The second discourse, which emanated from the reform movement in teacher
education launched by A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in
Education, 1983), was concerned with aligning teacher education with broader trends in
ethics education in the professions. In the wake of A Nation at Risk, two major
commissions on teacher education were struck in 1986, the Holmes Group initiative and
the Carnegie Task Force. Both groups’ analyses of the state of teacher education in the
 2

United States, as well as their recommendations about how to improve teacher education,
took as a touchstone the model of professional education that had emerged in medicine
over the course of the 20th century (Wiggins, 1986). The reports of both groups, for
instance, advocated the abolition of undergraduate degrees in education to be replaced by
“clinical schools” under the auspices of local school districts and both reports urged
trustee institutions responsible for overseeing teacher education to work towards a field-
wide consensus on the “knowledge base of teacher professionalism.” In the short term,
the impact of these reports was to lend a great deal of credence to the idea that teacher
education in the future would look more and more like medical education. In the teacher
education literature, a new idea began to be taken very seriously by a number of high-
profile educationalists: that the basic conception of professional ethics education that had
emerged with the modernization of medical education—focusing on familiarizing
students with codes of ethics, the ethical concepts embedded in practice, the inherent
ethical complexity of professionals’ work (and the attendant ethical dilemmas)—now had
a place in teacher education.
It is of no small significance that one publication more than any other epitomizes
this new-found interest in the ethics of teaching: a course book, destined for use in initial
teacher education (ITE), by Strike and Soltis (1985) titled The ethics of teaching. To
mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of this seminal book, this
article proposes a narrative review of the scholarly writings on professional ethics
education for future teachers. More precisely, the review is a targeted investigation of a
particular strand of scholarly writing which, like Strike and Soltis’s work, is characterized
by a concern with preparing future teachers to assume the role of the educational
professional who is accountable to a more or less explicit set of collective norms that
define ethical practice. On such an occasion, it seems right in and of itself to take stock of
this specific field in order to acquire a general sense of where it has come since the
emergence of a sustained discourse on the topic of professional ethics education for
teachers in the middle of the 1980s. At this juncture, however, a review of the scholarly
writings on this theme is particularly urgent, we believe, since it has become increasingly
apparent that the intervening decades of sustained research and scholarly reflection on the
ethics of teaching, and the intimate link between teacher professionalism and the
 3

cultivation of ethical practice (for a review, see Campbell, 2008a), has yielded little in
terms of an impact on teacher education. Judging on the basis of repeated affirmations in
the literature (see Bergem, 1993; Boon, 2011; Bradley, 1998; Bruneau, 1998; Bull, 1993,
Campbell, 2008b; Coombs, 1998; Glanzer & Ream, 2007; Maruyama & Ueno 2010;
Nash, 1991; Oser, 1994; Ungaretti, Dorsey, Freeman, & Bologna, 1997), mandatory
ethics-related courses are vanishingly rare in programs of study in teaching, and the
hopes once invested in the idea of teaching ethics as integrated curriculum in the early
days of the professionalization of teaching (see Goodlad, Soder, & Sirotnik, 1990) have
largely been disappointed. We conduct this review, therefore, with an eye to providing
readers—most of whom will undoubtedly be teacher educators who, like ourselves, may
be wondering what, if anything, can be done to narrow this gap—with a guide to the
scholarly writings. Our aim is to stake out the major positions expressed in the literature
on a set of issues that are of central interest to anyone involved in ethics education for
future teachers, namely:

 How does professional ethics education contribute to teacher professionalism?

 Which professional skills, qualities or characteristics should be developed?
 What content should be included in a course on ethics for future teachers?
 What teaching and learning approaches have been tried and with what success?
 Is ethics best taught in a dedicated course or as integrated curriculum?

The intent of this paper, however, is not merely informative. What makes this review of
the literature a narrative review is that, in addition to synthesizing viewpoints on these
and other aspects of teaching professional ethics to teacher candidates, we map out how
opinions have evolved over time and identify, in light of the results of the review, the
most critical deficits in this literature in order to draft a set of recommendations for future
inquiry (cf. Baumeister & Leary, 1997).

Method, Theoretical Perspective, and Sources

A search was conducted for peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on Google
Scholar and in three abstract databases (i.e., PSYCHINFO, ERIC and the Philosopher’s
 4

Index) using these search terms: professional ethics in teaching, teacher professionalism,
teacher/teaching ethics, moral/ethical dimensions of teaching, ethics curriculum, and
educational ethics. The results obtained using these search terms were further filtered
through the theoretical perspective on ethics education for future teachers that we elected
to adopt for this review—i.e., the “professional ethics” perspective.
As we understand it, the professional ethics perspective which represents one of at
least three ethical dimensions of teaching treated extensively in research and writing on
ethics in education, views teachers as being subject to a set of common norms of
professional conduct that exist primarily to ensure that teachers provide the highest
quality of public service and exercise the authority granted to them by society
responsibly. Typically articulated in a code of professional ethics or cognate document,
the norms of ethical professionalism are meant to guide practitioners’ conduct for a
specific social purpose: that of maintaining public trust in the profession (Abbott, 1988;
Banks, 2003; Sockett, 1990). In teacher preparation, the professional ethics perspective
entails that the focus of ethics education is to initiate future professionals into a
community of practice defined by a shared conception of what it means to act ethically
and responsibly in the provision of educational services. The professionalism agenda in
ethics education for future teachers, then, is distinguishable from the moral education
agenda, on one hand, and the social justice agenda, on the other. Whereas the moral
education agenda centers on preparing teachers to foster character, virtues or values in
young people, the social justice agenda centers on raising future teachers’ awareness
about social exclusion and the public school as a potential motor of social justice, and
preparing them to act as agents of social justice and equality. Admittedly, the distinctions
here are somewhat artificial in the sense that it is difficult to separate them neatly in
practice. To give a simplistic example, when teachers treat their pupils fairly they are
respecting norms of ethical professionalism and promoting equality as a moral and social
value through modeling and acting to ensure that their school is free from discrimination.
Furthermore, because each of the three agendas prioritizes a particular ideal of the
teacher’s role in society, they are bound to generate normative friction. The
professionalism agenda in ethics education, for example, is routinely critiqued for
obscuring crucial macro-ethical issues in professional practice because it focusses
 5

narrowly on teachers as individual actors responsible for their own conduct and the
immediate well-being of their clients (cf. Ladd, 1998; MacKay, Sutherland, & Pochini,
2013). Without wishing to take sides on the question of whether one should establish a
hierarchical ordering of these agendas in teacher education, we would nevertheless insist,
following Campbell (2011), that preparing ethically accountable practitioners versed in
the collective standards of teacher professionalism, supporting new teachers’ capacity to
act effectively as moral educators, and raising teachers’ awareness about how the school
systems can reinforce deep seeded social injustices constitute three distinct objectives of
pre-service teacher education.
Our focus on works aligned with the professional ethics perspective on teacher
education meant that we had to exclude important and insightful work relying on other
perspectives, such as that pursued by feminist scholars on the “ethics of care” (esp.
Noddings, 1984), work by critical theorists in the area of social justice (e.g., Darling-
Hammond, 2002), and work by poststructuralist scholars interested in the “ethics of the
Other” (e.g., Ruitenberg, 2015).
After an initial scan to determine the main emergent themes, the selected
publications were classified according to their degree of relevance to the following four
analytic categories: why ethics should be part of teacher education; the objectives of
professional ethics education in teaching; teaching and learning about ethics in pre-
service teacher education; and challenges to introducing ethics curriculum. The results
section that follows reviews the literature according to this schema.
In all, 26 primary sources were identified which met our inclusion and exclusion
criteria. These works represent a variety of methodological perspectives on the subject of
ethics education for future teachers. Some scholars work from a theoretical perspective
and reflect on the goals or content of ethics education for teachers (Bull, 1993; Coombs,
1998; Nash, 1991; Watras, 1986). Others frame their work on qualitative research,
examining for example, teachers’ or future teachers’ perceptions of their ethical
education (Boon, 2011; Campbell, 2008b, 2011). Many also work from a
phenomenological perspective and describe their previous experiences with initiatives of
teaching ethics to prospective teachers (Blumenfeld-Jones, Senneville & Crawford, 2013;
Fallona & Canniff, 2013; Stengel, 2013; Strike, 1993; Johnson, Vare, & Evers, 2013;
 6

Ungaretti et al., 1997) From a theoretical perspective, some scholars are concerned with
principles and duties (Strike, 1990) or on the central importance of developing ethical
skills (e.g., Boon, 2011; Campbell, 2008b; 2011; Howe, 1986; Nash, 1991;Soltis, 1986;
Stengel, 2013) while some invoke the language of virtue ethics (Blumenfeld-Jones et al.,
2013; Carr, 2000; Watras, 1986).
Although efforts were made to conduct a comprehensive review given our search
parameters and theoretical perspective, the possibility remains that some publications that
clearly fit our selection criteria did not come to our attention. In conducting the initial
search, we discovered a considerable number of works that provided occasional insights
into the themes and questions guiding our analysis or dealt with these themes piecemeal.
To reduce the number of sources to manageable quantity, and increase the efficiency of
the review process, we retained only articles and book chapters whose primary focus was
the issue of teaching and learning about professional ethics in initial teacher education.
Notwithstanding these limitations, we are confident that the body of writings reviewed
for this article is representative of the academic writings on professional ethics education
for future teachers over the last 30 years.

Results
Why Ethics Should be Part of Teacher Education
Both converging strands of research and reflection that led to a new-found
appreciation for making ethics an integral part of the university-based education of
teachers, referred to above in the introduction, have been put to work by scholars to
justify including ethics training in programs of initial teacher education.
With respect to the discourse on the professionalization of teachers and teachings,
a number of scholars take as a key premise in the argument that ITE should include the
explicit teaching of ethics content is that knowledge of the profession’s ethical norms is a
basic requirement of professionalism and professional practice (e.g., Bruneau, 1998;
Campbell, 2011; 2013; Soltis, 1986; Strike, 1990; Watras, 1986). As Soltis (1986) points
out, “when a person becomes a member of a profession, he or she joins a historical
community of practice with a telos, a general purpose, that one must be committed to in
order to be a professional” (p. 3). Belonging to a historical community of practice with its
 7

own body of practical and theoretical knowledge and its own set of collective norms is
what allows professionals to go beyond their subjective intuitions and make
“professional” judgments. That is to say, professionals have a basic obligation to judge
and act in reference to collective standards, rather than their own individual and
subjective ideas about what is right, necessary and effective in a work situation. For this
reason, a number of authors come back repeatedly to the idea that the profession’s
fundamental ethical principles must be explicitly taught in initial teacher education as a
means of promoting teacher professionalism. From this point of view, the education of
teachers should necessarily include (though of course not limited to) the teaching and
learning of ethical principles as they are articulated in the profession’s code of ethical
conduct (Campbell, 2013; Soltis, 1986; Ungaretti et al., 1997). Ungaretti et al. (1997), for
example, stated that, “the development of cognitive strategies and dialogic competence to
identify ethical dilemmas and reflect upon behavior through a commonly held code
enhances the professionalism of all in the field” (p. 278). This passage underlines the fact
that learning about collective codes of professional conduct, while important for raising
the professional status of a community of practice, only has value if pursued in tandem
with the development of certain cognitive and dialogical competencies. Because it aims
to develop the knowledge and competencies necessary to reflect on one’s actions and
publicly justify one’s professional choices, training in ethics can be seen as a lying at the
heart of the professional education of teachers.
However, with Strike (1990), let us note that quite aside from the professionalism
perspective on the ethics education of teachers there is now little doubt that teaching,
because it affects people’s development in such a profound way, is a fundamentally
moral enterprise. Ethical considerations are to be found in teachers’ work at every turn: in
pedagogical practices, in curricular content, in relations with pupil, parents and
colleagues, in evaluation, etc. Much of this moral dimension of teaching is hidden in the
day-to-day routines of teaching and is rarely the subject of conscious reflection on the
part of teachers (Blumenfeld-Jones et al., 2013; Bruneau, 1998; Mahony, 2009; Strike,
1990). Nevertheless, there is unanimous agreement in the scholarly writings that it is
important to make certain key ethical principles explicit in the formation of morally
 8

responsible practitioners, such as fairness, empathy, honesty, patience by dealing with

them in formal teaching and guided reflection (see Campbell, 2013).
Research on teacher candidates’ moral judgment development. A number of
authors have also argued that making ethics content more central to pre-service teacher
preparation could help rectify a potentially worrisome trend revealed by empirical
research on students’ cognitive moral judgment development. Several decades of work in
this area has consistently found that pre-service teaching students obtain lower scores
than their peers enrolled in other programs of study on the Defining Issues Test (DIT 1), a
standardized test of moral reasoning (Bloom, 1976; Chang, 1994; Cummings, Dyas,
Maddux, & Kochman, 2001; McNeel, 1994; Yeazell & Johnson, 1988). Moreover, cohort
studies have found that the cognitive moral judgment development of education students
plateaus over the course of their programs of study, a trend which runs counter to the
typical trajectory of moral judgment development among college and university students.
In DIT studies of undergraduates, age and education level are frequently singled out as
being the two most strongly factors associated with increase in moral reasoning
competency (Bakken & Ellsworth, 1990; Boom & Molenaar, 1989; Rest et al., 1999;
Thoma, 1986). In their review of the DIT research on moral judgment development in the
teaching profession, Cummings, Harlow and Maddux (2007) attribute this phenomenon
to, among other things, a curriculum that provides few opportunities for critical thinking
(cf. Cummings, Wiest, Lamitina, & Maddux, 2003). Cummings et al. (2007) also
reported that the small number of interventions studies, most of which were published
several decades ago, indicate that “direct instruction in moral judgment development
theory and dilemma discussion advance moral reasoning of education students” (p. 72,
see also Cummings, Maddux & Cladianos, 2010).

The objectives of professional ethics education for teachers

There is a general consensus in the literature that the aim of professional ethics
education should be to equip students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions to make
ethically responsible decisions in professional practice. Differences of opinion exist,
however, over the specifics of exactly what knowledge, skills and dispositions are most
important to develop to achieve the goal of responsible decision-making and which ones
 9

are most amenable to being taught in the typical didactic context of university-based
teacher education. Furthermore, we can see a gradual but fairly marked attitude shift in
relation to promoting personal ethical qualities such as fairness, caring and honesty as an
aim of ethics education for teachers. Whereas the earlier writings tended to dismiss
“making students ethically better people” as an inappropriate or unrealistic aim, more
recent writings display a much greater openness to the idea of cultivating ethical
character traits or virtues.
Kenneth Strike’s 1990 paper “Teaching ethics to teachers” put forward a view on
the aims of ethics education for teachers that clearly resonated with teacher educators
insofar as it represents a standard view that, in broad outline and with few dissenters, is
endorsed consistently in the literature (e.g., Bruneau, 1998; Coombs 1998; Freeman,
1999; Howe, 1986; Nash, 1991; Oser & Althof, 1993; Soltis, 1986; Vokey, 2005; Watras,
1986). The starting point is that teaching, like other professions, has a specific set of
ethical concepts which define and frame ethically responsible conduct: fairness, due
process, respect for privacy and dignity, intellectual honesty, etc. The primary aim of
ethics education for teachers, according to Strike (1990), should be to familiarize student
with what Coombs (1998) calls the “public moral language” (p. 564) of their future
profession. However, the fact that knowing when these concepts apply and what concrete
actions they require—in particular in circumstances which give rise to conflicting
obligations—requires careful discernment. This gives rise to the second main aim of
ethics education: it should provide instruction in the application of ethical concepts to
cases.
One of the main reasons why Strike (1990) is drawn to the idea that ethics
education for teachers should concentrate on promoting an understanding key ethical
concepts and helping preservice teachers develop skills in applying concepts to cases is
because he considers that these aims that can be realistically achieved. For similarly
pragmatic reasons, he rejects “the development of character” as “naïve” (p. 47) and
“inappropriate” (p. 50). Strike’s reservations here are in part due to his skepticism about
the power of ethics curriculum to “make prospective teachers better people” (p. 52) but
clearly, Strike is also aware that there is a deeper issue at stake which links to the
 10

complex relationship between ethical dispositions and professionalism. Namely, good

character and good will are insufficient for ethically responsible professional conduct.
This basic observation has informed the emergence of a nuanced version of
Strike’s standard view of the aims of ethics education for teachers which emphasizes
challenging students’ intuitive sense of what it means to be an “ethical teacher” (Boon,
2011; Campbell, 2008b; 2011; Nash, 1991; Stengel, 2013). Boon (2011) and Campbell
(2011) found that education students are on the whole keenly aware of the teacher’s role
as a model of morality and responsible citizenship, and accept that society imposes on
them moral standards that are higher than average. This “need for teachers to be
particular kinds of persons” (Carr, 2006, p. 177), which stems from the responsibility
society places on teachers to contribute to young people’s holistic development, tends to
muddy the distinction between standards of professional conduct and personal notions
about being a nice person (Campbell, 2008; Nash, 1991). Hence, a crucial objective of
introducing students to the concepts of educational ethics, and helping them learn to
judiciously apply these concepts, should be to sharpen this distinction in student teachers’
minds by showing that teachers’ personal moral intuitions are not necessarily a reliable
guide to what society and the profession expect of them in their professional role. One
noteworthy and recurrent objection to the Strikean “cognitive” (Strike, 1990, p. 52) view
and its attendant skepticism about cultivating moral character traits as a legitimate aim of
ethics instruction for teachers, is that it fails to take into account that ethical reasoning,
including the application of ethical concepts to cases, presupposes at least one moral
disposition: moral perception (Bricker, 1993; Coombs, 1998; Stengel, 2013; Vokey,
2005). In essence, the argument is that, if deliberating about ethical issues in professional
practice requires the disposition “to attend carefully to the details of the particular
problematic situation in which appropriate moral judgment and action need to be
determined” (Coombs, 1998, p. 569), then it is incumbent on ethics education to make
sure that students possess some basic capacities in this area.
A paradigm shift has occurred in recent years about the cultivation of personal
dispositions as a legitimate aim of ethics education for teachers. Recent writings have all
but abandoned the reticence about the difficulties associated with fostering virtue in a
short program of formal study, which was such a dominant theme in the literature up to
 11

about 2000. Without feeling compelled in any way to justify what would have earlier
been seen as a controversial personological orientation, Johnson et al. (2013) state
confidently that, “teacher education programs must decide how to best cultivate the
development of [fairness and the belief that all children can learn] and other dispositions
in their candidates, and how to assess the demonstration of dispositions in daily
classroom activities” (p. 92). Similarly, in describing the theoretical framework of a
program-based approach to integrating ethics curriculum, Fallona and Canniff (2013) tell
us, “we ground the definitions and practices articulated in the Equity Framework in moral
and intellectual virtue. Virtue ethics serves as our moral base because the best human life
requires the exercise of virtue.” (p. 76) Reading these authors’ accounts however, it is
clear that they too have realistic goals about what can be achieved in ITE with regard to
the development of dispositions. Again, what appears to have enabled this greater
receptivity to dispositions is a change in perspective on the criteria of what constitutes a
reasonable aim of ethics education.

Teaching and learning about ethics in pre-service teacher education

There is a clear consensus on the interest of using case studies or, more
specifically, the study of moral dilemmas as an approach to teaching and learning about
ethics in pre-service teacher education. However, certain transformations can be observed
in connection with the way in which this approach has been understood in the scholarly
writings over time. In the previous section, we saw how scholars’ perspectives on the
primary objectives of ethics education of future teachers gradually became more open to
the idea of educating for the development of moral dispositions or character traits.
Unsurprisingly, this change is reflected in the teaching methods favored and
recommended by teacher educators writing on ethics education. Research conducted in
the 1980s and ‘90s tended to produce rather general, descriptive accounts of how to use
of moral dilemmas to foster the development of cognitive ethical skills (especially moral
reasoning and reflection) and provide practice on how to apply ethical concepts to
difficult cases (see Howe, 1986; Hostelter, 1996; Luckowski, 1997; Schrader, 1993;
Soltis, 1986; Strike 1993; Watras, 1986). More recent work, by contrast, tends instead to
provide personal and highly particular accounts of educational practices and broader
 12

teaching-unit level initiatives aimed at getting student teachers engaged with the ethical
dimensions of teaching (see Blumenfeld-Jones et al., 2013; Fallona & Canniff, 2013;
Johnson et al., 2013; Stengel, 2013; Warnick et Silverman, 2011).
Howe (1986) put forward one of the earliest articulations of a general approach to
the study and resolution of moral dilemmas in professional formation that seems to have
exercised much influence on subsequent thinking in this area. Inspired by Wilson’s
(1967) research on moral functioning, Howe’s (1986) approach distinguishes six
characteristics at the base of “critical reflection”: appreciation for moral deliberation,
empathy, interpersonal skills, knowledge, reasoning, and courage. In general terms, it
involves repeatedly introducing students to increasingly complex but realistic cases and
having them work together to find solutions to the problem and identify the underlying
ethical principles and concepts apparent in the situations.
Over the course of the ensuing decades, dilemma discussions around cases—and
several authors repeatedly underscore the effectiveness of using realistic dilemmas
derived from real cases—remain a pivotal aspect of accounts of professional ethics
education for teachers. This does not mean, however, that their treatment is entirely static.
On the contrary, the particular way in which case studies are used, as well as the
justification of their use, seems to have evolved. Increasingly concerned with how to
influence students’ “inner world” and moral sensitivity, several commentators go to great
lengths to describe in detail their personal experiences teaching ethics to future teachers
in order to illustrate the techniques they have developed for “sensitizing” their students
(e.g., Blumenfeld-Jones et al., 2013; Johnson et al., 2013; Strike, 1993; Warnick &
Silverman, 2011). Some authors recommend focusing on stimulating students’
engagement by inviting them to reflect on their personal experiences as a pupil, student or
educator (Campbell, 2013; Coombs, 1998). Others, like Bruneau (1998), recommended
placing students in simulated but realistic moral dilemma situations. In order to engage
students in ethical issues in teaching, she uses in her teaching “cooperative learning
strategies including real-life stories, pictures and role-playing games” (Bruneau, 1998, p.
259).
Furthermore, some writers underline how important it is for future teachers to
reflect on and identify their own values (Nash, 1991), personal intuitions (Vokey, 2005),
 13

as well as the social values that implicitly structure the school and the curriculum
(Blumenfeld-Jones et al., 2013; Stengel, 2013). The idea is to lead students to develop an
awareness of the moral systems that guide their actions as a means of encouraging them
to call those moral systems into question and, if necessary, work towards change. A clear
example of an educational intervention is Blumenfeld-Jones et al’s (2013) program,
“Building an ethical self”. These authors propose an approach which, in addition to
helping students develop the rational aspects of ethical deliberation, aims to promote a
kind of inner sensitivity they refer to as “the felt life.” In their view, much of ethical
experience takes place in the course of authentic contact with others and cannot be
reduced to the mastery of a mere ethical vocabulary.
Commentators generally agree that, considering the fundamentally moral nature
of teaching, ethics would, in an ideal world at least, be taught as integrated curriculum.
But the majority of them nevertheless acknowledge that it is preferable for teacher
candidates to take courses that are specifically dedicated to professional ethics (see
Bruneau, 1998; Campbell, 2008b; Campbell, 2013; Howe, 1986; Watras, 1986). Unless
they do, these authors argue, there is a danger that the topic of ethics will become diluted
within teacher education programs or taught by instructors who lack the necessary
familiarity with professional ethics in teaching.
Individual differences between pedagogical strategies and instructional aims
notwithstanding, there is a tendency among scholars, then, to prioritize independent
courses, taught by specialists in ethics, and focused on the analysis and resolution of
moral dilemmas. While all agree that it is necessary to juxtapose various kinds of
curricular content in order to enrich the process of ethical reflection, views about what
content to emphasize in an ethics course for future teachers vary considerably. As
mentioned above, some insist on the importance of including the analysis of ethical codes
or similar relevant public documents (Bruneau, 1998; Campbell, 2013; Soltis, 1986;
Warnick & Silverman, 2011) and introducing students to a common ethical language of
the teaching profession (Strike, 1993). Others consider it important to familiarize students
with the main theories of normative ethics (Bull, 1993; Campbell, 2013; Soltis, 1986;
Warnick & Silverman, 2011), like consequentialism, deontologism, pragmatism, care
ethics, virtue ethic or Levinas’s humility ethics (Blumenfeld-Jones et al., 2013; Campbell,
 14

2013). Finally, a more limited number of authors elaborate analytic frameworks made up
of a series of specific steps that students are invited to apply when confronted with an
ethical dilemma (Campbell, 2013; Warnick & Silverman, 2011).
Breaking with the general pattern of favoring a stand-alone ethics course in the
literature, a few papers explore avenues to more integrated forms of ethics education for
future teachers (i.e., Fallona & Caniff, 2013; Johnson et al., 2013; Stengel 2013). For
example, through a five year action research project, Johnson et al. (2013) report having
transformed their department’s curriculum so that it became centered on the development
of two professional dispositions considered essential by their local accreditation body:
fairness and the belief that all children can learn. The strength of their approach is its
sharp focus on evaluating the acquisition of these key dispositions. In this way, the moral
dimensions of teaching run through the whole curriculum. A more modest approach to
integrated ethics education is that of Stengel (2013), who describes how she introduces
her students to the moral dimensions of their work in a course on the “Foundations of
Modern Education.” The course moves back and forth between articulating ethical
considerations, describing real practices, and reflecting on the moral responsibilities of
teachers. In light of this experience, Stengel (2013) concludes that “any course can enable
teachers to attend and respond to this ineluctably moral practice if designed to do so” (p.
59).
In sum, the scholarly writings on teaching and learning about ethical issues in pre-
service teacher education indicate that, while approaches to the teaching and learning of
professional ethics in pre-service teacher have gradually become more diversified and
refined, professional ethics education for teachers is, across the board, characterized by a
considerable degree of variability: variability in form (Is it taught as integrated
curriculum or in a stand-alone course?), variability in method (How is it taught?), and
variability in content (What topics, themes and concepts are students likely to
encounter?).

Challenges to introducing ethics curriculum

Expressed recurrently in the scholarly writings is a concern that teacher education
has resisted the ethics movement in higher education (Bergem, 1993; Boon, 2011;
 15

Bradley, 1998; Bruneau, 1998; Bull, 1993, Campbell, 2008b; Coombs, 1998; Glanzer &
Ream, 2007; Maruyama & Ueno 2010; Nash, 1991; Oser, 1994; Ungaretti et al., 1997).
Following the introduction of the National Education Association’s code of ethics in
1975, and against the background of the major drive, discussed above, to professionalize
teaching and teacher education, there was, in the 1980s, a period of apparent confidence
that it was only a matter of time before ethics in teaching would have a central place in
teacher education programs, either in the form of a dedicated course or as integrated
curriculum (Goodlad, 1990; Howe, 1986; Sichel, 1983; Soltis, 1986; Strike, 1990; Strike
& Soltis, 1985; Watras, 1986). By the early 1990s, teacher educators had already begun
to raise doubts about the progress being made in this direction and attempt to account for
why teacher education, as Glanzer and Ream (2007) put it, had “missed the ethics boom”.
Hypothetical explanations for the perceived neglect of ethics curriculum in pre-
service teacher education are scattered throughout the literature but the most detailed
treatments of the question are to be found in papers by Bull (1993) and Coombs (1998).
The most common explanation, perhaps, is that direct instruction in ethics runs counter to
a cherished notion, as widespread among teacher candidates as teacher educators, that
there is little more to being an ethical professional than simply being a “nice person.” The
explanation takes multiple forms, but the essence of it seems to be that teacher educators
are reluctant to include required courses in ethics in teacher education programs because
they feel that doing so would send a message to students that they are “immoral” and
untrustworthy and suggest education programs admit candidates who are at risk of
behaving unethically in professional settings (Bruneau, 1998; Campbell, 2008;
Maruyaman & Ueno, 2010; Nash, 1991). As we saw above, several commentators
consider the raison d’être of ethics education for teachers as being precisely to counter
this misconception—namely, that good will and good character are sufficient to
guarantee ethical practice. As these authors point out, it is of course entirely possible to
be a very good person yet misunderstand or be unaware of the ethical standards that one
is expected to meet when one occupies a particular professional role. Other explanations
put forward in the literature are: compared with medicine, ethical challenges emerging
from rapid technological advances are rare in education (Coombs, 1998); unlike in
business, it is uncommon for ethical scandals in education to reach the national public
 16

stage (Coombs, 1998); offering a mandatory ethics course would require a faculty-wide
agreement about the ethical obligations and responsibilities of teachers, but it is
unrealistic to think that such an agreement could be reached (Bull, 1993); and ethical
issues are routinely dealt with as integrated curriculum in mandatory courses on social
foundations of education, so an ethics course would simply be redundant (Bruneau,
1998).
Survey studies and qualitative research. Two survey studies provide a point of
comparison—albeit a limited one—with the recurring anecdotal claims that initial teacher
preparation has lagged behind other fields of professional formation with respect to ethics
instruction. In a survey of early childhood educators’ teaching practices, Freeman and
Brown (1996) found that, even though teacher educators commonly named teaching and
learning about professional ethics as a course objective, they actually dedicated very few
class hours to the ethics component of their courses. Addressing the question of where
teacher education stands in relation to other disciplines, Glanzer and Ream (2007)
conducted a comparative survey of dedicated ethics courses in various professional
programs. Their results indicated that, as a general rule, whereas one third to one half of
the professional majors surveyed included at least one course concerned primarily with
ethics, an ethics-related course was mandatory in only 6% of teacher education programs
(Glanzer & Ream, 2007). The fields of comparison were nursing, business, social work,
journalism, engineering, and computer science. When considering this finding, it is
important to bear in mind the significant methodological limitations of Glanzer and
Ream’s (2007) study. The sample was composed exclusively of religiously affiliated
colleges and universities in the United States and their definition of “ethics course” was
broad enough to encompass not only courses dealing with professional ethics but also
those focussing on the moral and character education of children in schools.
The only directly relevant qualitative research to have been conducted on ethics
content in ITE was that by Campbell (2008b, 2011) and Boon (2011), who in parallel
studies sought to better understanding how ethics curriculum and content is handled in
teacher education. On the basis of an analysis of documentary evidence describing
courses and programs in teacher education at several Canadian universities, and
interviewing over 60 teaching students and teacher educators, Campbell (2008, 2011)
 17

concluded that when ethics is taught as integrated curriculum, its delivery is patchy and
unequal across programs. Her findings indicated, furthermore, that courses dedicated to
ethics in teaching are exceedingly rare. In a similar study involving approximately 100
participants enrolled in a pre-service teaching degree at one Australian university, Boon
(2011) found that pre-service teachers felt a need for training in ethics that was not being
adequately met by their program and, like Campbell (2011), Boon (2011) concluded that
courses dedicated to ethics in teaching are not the dominant mode of delivering ethics
content.

Discussion
Looking back over a 30-year literature, this review has revealed a surprising level of
consistency among authors on the key themes that framed the review: the arguments for
why ethics content should be part of the teacher education curriculum, the main objective
of professional ethics education for teachers, and recommended teaching strategies.
Multiple challenges to formal teaching and learning about ethical issues in teacher
education are reported anecdotally in the literature and pervasive in the literature is a
sense that required ethics-related courses are generally absent from ITE programs and
ethics tends to be a neglected topic. The limited empirical research on ethics education in
preservice teacher preparation complements and provides some confirmation of the
anecdotal reports, suggesting that despite the several decades of scholarly work
documented in this review which argues for why a more central place needs to be
assigned to ethics content in ITE, presents models of the objectives of professional ethics
education for teachers, describes approaches to teaching and learning about professional
ethics in teaching, and attempts to uncover the challenges facing ethics curriculum in ITE
ethics education for teacher, in actual practice, is still in its infancy. As we expected, our
overview of the recent evolution of the field has also brought to light certain deficits in
the literature. This concluding section briefly outlines what strike us as two of the most
apparent and urgent of these deficits and comments on the directions for future inquiry
that they suggest.
 18

Survey work
One direction for future research clearly signposted by this review is to undertake
appropriately designed survey work on how common mandatory ethics-related courses
are in ITE. It was observed above that, since about 2000, a received idea has emerged
among authors writing on professional ethics in teaching that ITE has not kept up with
other professional fields in requiring that ethics be a core part of the teacher education
curriculum. The contrast between the confidence with which authors make this assertion
and the limited nature of the evidence for it is striking. It was not until 2007, we saw, that
a multi-site survey on ethics education for future teachers was conducted (i.e., Glanzer &
Ream, 2007). Further, and as suggested above, methodological issues linked to sampling
and the study’s definition of its core concept, “ethics course,” would lead one to believe
that there are even fewer opportunities for formal teaching and learning about ethics in
the large non-denominational state and regional public colleges and universities where
the majority of teachers are trained (see Bull, 1993; Goodlad et al., 1990; Lanier & Little,
1986) than there are in the religiously affiliated institutions of higher education surveyed
by Glanzer and Ream (2007). Given the current state of the research, then, reliable,
generalizable knowledge about how common mandatory ethics-related courses are in
teacher education is in short supply.
Educational researchers wishing to explore in this direction do not have to start
from scratch. Fortunately, there exists a considerable body of similar survey work on
ethics curriculum in other professions,2 which could be drawn on as both a source of
methodological insights and to provide a crucial point of comparison to determine where
ITE stands in relation to other professional fields in making an introductory ethics course
a requirement of graduation and a condition of professional certification.
The importance of acquiring this knowledge resides not only in confirming or, as
the case may by, giving the lie to the anecdotal reports recurrent in the literature. More
significantly, it would provide scholars committed to the potential contribution of
learning about professional ethics in teaching to the formation of the next generation of
teachers with a grounded sense of where to concentrate their efforts. For example, if
Glanzer and Ream’s (2007) rather dismal findings are reproduced, it might signal a need
to find new and innovative ways to advance the cause of ethics content and the promotion
 19

of ethical capacities in ITE. If not, then a judicious response may be to focus on opening
lines of communication between teacher educators, in-service teachers and school
leaders, and trustee institutions to work towards better understanding of how professional
ethics education can be designed and delivered so as to best serve the interests of teacher
professionalism.

Assessment and outcome studies

Research looking at the assessment and outcomes of ethics education initiatives
for future teachers is another area with huge potential for growth. Conspicuously absent
from the literature on the teaching and learning about ethics in ITE are works that speak
directly to the question of the success of the teaching and learning approaches have been
experimented with. The results of our synthesis and interpretation of the arguments for
why ethics should be part of teacher education identified three considerations that authors
found most salient. According to the work we surveyed, ethics education enhances
quality teaching because: (a) familiarity with the collective norms of the profession and
their practical application is conducive, if not essential, to professionalism, (b) reflecting
on the ethical dimensions of teaching increases teachers’ sensitivity to the ethical issues
that arise in professional practice, and (c) grappling with ethical problems intellectually
promotes students’ cognitive moral judgment development, making them more likely to
find the most rationally defensible solutions to the ethical dilemmas encountered at work.
Though mostly predating this review, a substantial body of literature exists with respect
to the third argument and, as mentioned above, has been the subject of a thorough review
by Cummings et al. (2007). With respect to the first and second arguments, however, a
few exceptions notwithstanding (i.e., Blumenfeld-Jones et al. 2013; Boon 2011,
Campbell, 2008b), there is a remarkable lack of outcome research that looks at the link
between ethics education and teacher professionalism or ethical sensitivity in practice.
Here again, the potential use value of such outcomes research for both the theory
and practice of professional ethics education in ITE is great. To name just a few
applications, comparative methods research could provide valuable information for
teacher educators on the advantages of various pedagogical approaches for achieving
their teaching and learning objectives. Descriptive work on the outcomes of existing
 20

dedicated courses or other initiatives would, by building on the contributions in Sanger

and Osguthorpe’s (2013) volume, increase the resources available to educators seeking
guidance on how to design or refine curricula and teaching strategies. Finally,
observational case studies, following the lead of Colby and Sullivan’s (2008) work in
engineering, which involved site visits to document the strengths and weaknesses of
different professional schools’ attempts to take up the challenge of ethics education for
future teachers, would provide access to a greater range of models for strengthening the
teaching of ethics and promoting professional responsibility in ITE.
As in the case of future survey studies, outcomes research in ethics education for
teachers can get a leg up by consulting empirical studies on the impact of professional
ethics instruction beyond the field of teaching.3 Even where findings are not readily
transferable out of the professional field of origin into teaching, they can play a crucial
role in informing methodological choices about study design and measures to adopt and
helping generate hypotheses.

The last thirty years of scholarship on ethics education for future teachers should
give us confidence in the potential of ethics education to make an essential contribution
to the formation of highly professional and ethically responsible teachers. In the next
thirty years, we hope, efforts to consolidate the field and make a greater impact on the
university-based education of teachers will be strengthened and enriched by an increased
appreciation for the value of empirical methods and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Acknowledgements
The authors thank Muriel Bebeau (University of Minnesota), Helen Boon (James Cook
University), Elizabeth Campbell (University of Toronto), France Jutras (Université de
Sherbooke), William Smale (Trent University), and two anonymous reviewers for
providing valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Presentations of the
project were given at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Values of the University of
Birmingham and at the Ethics Institute of Utrecht University. The authors wish to thank
audience members for the valuable feedback and encouragement offered on those
 21

occasions. This work was supported financially by a grant from the Fonds de recherche
du Québec – Société et culture (#2014-NP-173847).

Biographical notes
Bruce Maxwell is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Quebec at
Trois-Rivières. His work deals with professional ethics in teaching, ethical issues in
education, and ethical development through teaching and learning in schools.
Marina Schwimmer is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Integrated
Studies in Education at McGill University. She is interested in questions related to the
social and historical foundations of education, to ethics in education and to the
relationship between research, policy and practice in education.

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1
Some continue to regard the theoretical framework on which the Defining Issues Test’s is based, Kohlberg’s theory of
cognitive moral judgment development as controversial but the DIT remains the most widely used and well-validated
standardized assessments of moral judgment development (Thoma 2006). Since its inception, the Kohlbergian paradigm has
been dogged by criticisms, most notably for being biased against women (Gilligan, 1982) and for mistaking an ideal of
morality that is particular to Western, liberal, well-educated people for a universal standard (Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Liebert,
1984; Schweder, 1982). Both of these claims have been the object of extensive and rigorous empirical investigation.
Research findings suggest that the claim to gender bias cannot be sustained (Walker, 2006) and have provided confirmation
of the cross-cultural validity of Kohlberg’s six-stage scheme (Snarey, 1985; Snarey & Samuelson, 2008).
2
See, for example, the survey research on the state of ethics education previously conducted in medicine (Lehmann, Kasoff,
Koch & Federman, 2004), business (Christensen, Pierce, Hartman, Hoffman & Carrier, 2007), dentistry (Berk, 2001; Lantz,
Bebeau & Zarkowski, 2011), occupational therapy and physiotherapy (Hudon et al., 2013), neuroscience (Walther, 2013),
and engineering (Stephan, 1999).
3
See especially Winston’s (2007) cross disciplinary meta-analysis of research on the effects of ethics education on ethical
leadership and decision making and Warnick & Silverman’s (2011) discussion of this issue as it applies to teaching (p. 273-
274).