As a secondary school English Language Arts teacher, I am lucky enough to have the freedom to choose much of the content explored in my classroom. The refreshing lack of overspecificity in BC’s curriculum allows me to use inquiry-based pedagogy to discuss topics that I feel are relevant to my students while they are engaging with the curricular competencies. I would like to use this opportunity to have my students reflect on issues of moral philosophy. I want my students to explore relevant questions such as: What does it mean to mean to be a good person, do good things, and have a positive impact on the world? What responsibility do we have to the others around us? How can we determine or measure our impact on the world? These are questions that I simply did not consider when I was in my secondary school years. I was not considerate at all of my impact on others. The world seemed like a large, absurd place and I don’t think I believed in my ability to change any of it. While I never did anything monstrous, I was clearly living a selfish life. This attitude eventually got ironed out with maturity and life experience and reflection, but studying moral philosophy during my undergrad really got me to reflect on myself in a focused way. While I certainly do not consider myself morally flawless, I now see myself as able to impact the people around me and as having a responsibility to try and make this impact as positive as possible. When I am teaching my students, I see shades of my younger self in some of them, and I want to teach them to reflect on the impacts of their actions.
What I love about this topic is that there is rarely an objective answer to questions of ethics, and there is rich territory for debate and discussion. The teacher’s role here is not to prescribe a code of morality, but rather to facilitate learning opportunities in which students to reflect and form their own philosophies that evolve over time. A teacher could use overarching questions of moral philosophy to explore in virtually any discipline. A social studies class could explore the moral impacts of historical figures or modern social movements. Science classes could debate the merits of bioengineering or the impact of our actions on the environment. Math classes can discuss the implications of using data to drive decision-making and the potential devaluing of humans that may derive in these decisions. Art classes can discuss the ability of art to influence others. PE classes can explore how taking care of our bodies can help us be more mindful of our actions. And, for my purposes as an English language arts teacher, I can use literature and poetry as jumping-off points for discussions that deepen students’ views of morality as well as reflective writing to allow them to make connections to their own lives. The English Language Arts BC Curriculum lists one of the “Big Ideas” as “Exploring stories and other texts helps us understand ourselves and make connections to others and to the world”, providing an opportunity for these inquiries (British Columbia Ministry of Education 2016).
The role of education in promoting morality has evolved greatly over the past two centuries (Turgeon 2011). In nineteenth century Western schools, “one of the prime functions of public education was to prepare a moral citizen” based on prescribing Christian values (Turgeon 2011). The growing diversity of views in the Western world led to these values being put on the backburner while other approaches to teaching morality were implemented. Values Education was an educational paradigm that explored ethical scenarios in a non-judgemental way; this was criticized for promoting an overly relativistic view of morality in which one could rightly justify any action without being challenged. In the 1970s, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg inspired a trend in which ethical dilemmas were presented to students to have them grow morally by practice, though these were criticized for oversimplifying moral issues. More recently, character building has been encouraged in schools through “modeling, didactic stories, and programs rewarding good behavior, such as ‘school citizen of the month’” (Turgeon 2011).
In my time teaching, I have made it a point to make these questions of morality parts of my classes. When I taught social studies, I introduced my students to some schools of thought in normative ethics such as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. These lessons went well and created lively discussions among my students. However, I treated these as one-off lessons and some aspects of my teaching were overly “traditional”. Were I to teach these classes again, I would try to implement a more inquiry-based approach, using questions of morality as overarching Essential Questions that permeate our daily discussions of a variety of social studies topics.
One principle of inquiry I have always ascribed to in my classes is that I have always asked students to make personal connections to their work and tried to make the relevance of what is going on in classes very clear. When I was in school, the relevance of my classes was not always clear to me, and this led to apathy towards my studies. However, even in doing this my practice has been missing many of the elements of inquiry. Many of my activities were merely isolated lessons, with no connection to any greater themes or opportunity for deep exploration. I was at times caught in the trap of wanting to cover everything and thus covering some things in a very superficial way, teaching my classes, and (especially my science classes) as though they were, to quote our readings, “a mile wide and an inch deep” (Friesen 2015).
Moving forward, in my English Language Arts class this year, I would like to begin by discussing issues of morality and have students use this as a lens through which they view the texts we discuss, constantly reflecting and evolving their views as we revisit these essential questions. I want them to connect these overarching queries to the texts we are exploring as well as the world around them and, crucially, their own lived experiences. “Inquiry-based learning allows students to be active creators of knowledge; to see each other as authorities; and to validate their experiences, culture and, ultimately, themselves” (Brown 2004). If I implement this practice properly in my class, my students will deepen their ability to critically examine the moral impact of their actions and the actions of those around them.
References
British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2016) English Language Arts. Retrieved from https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/sites/curriculum.gov.bc.ca/files/curriculum/english-language-arts/en_english-language-arts_k-9.pdf
Brown, H. (2004). Walking into the Unknown: Inquiry-Based Learning Transforms the English Classroom. The English Journal 94(2), 43-48.
Friesen, S. (2015). Focus on Inquiry. Galileo Educational Network. Retrieved from https://inquiry.galileo.org/
Turgeon, W. (2011). The Challenge of Moral Education. Philosophy Now. Retrieved from https://philosophynow.org/issues/84/The_Challenge_of_Moral_Education