TEACHING ETHICS?   

Boomers are now in their sixties and seventies. Our generation greatly benefitted from the material prosperity of America after World War II, and many of us were first-generation college students who settled into decent jobs in diverse careers. Some of us chose teaching-related careers. Pensions and savings plans are enabling many former educators to enjoy their retirement lives.

How do we evaluate our many years of teaching students? I suppose that most of us regard our teaching careers as some mix of successes and failures. Please let me take a somewhat critical perspective and focus a bit on several negatives.  

Educators are surely aware that many studies indicate that our nation is now not at the high comparative levels for basic student performance of some other countries. We can likely blame this on other factors than the quality of teaching in our educational institutions, but teachers might reasonably assume at least a little of the responsibility.

Think back, long ago perhaps, to the teachers that you had as an elementary, high school or college student. How many of your teachers really did an excellent job in attracting your attention and greatly helping you to advance your knowledge of their subjects? I certainly experienced some amazing teachers who engaged and challenged me. I also took courses from what appeared to me as average or poor teachers who seemed largely to be “going through the motions.”

Of course, challenges and some failures exist at all teaching levels. Focusing more on teaching at the high school and college levels for which I’m more familiar, I’ll try to describe a big challenge and seeming failure that has long bothered me. It exists for many fields of knowledge, but more so for subjects that involve moral values and human agency. The challenge is effective teaching about “good citizenship” or ethical conduct.  

Courses in business, professional, and public sector ethics became common in diverse college curricula during the last half of the past century. Although I taught other undergraduate and grad courses in business management over my career, I was often the faculty member responsible for teaching required or elective courses in business ethics. At one university, I was an endowed professor in the business college and only taught that subject and the closely related topic of social and governmental relations for business. At another university, I got to team teach for several semesters with a female philosophy professor an applied ethics course for honor and interdisciplinary students. Over the course of more than 30 years, I often attended academic conferences and wrote articles in journals on applied ethics issues and teaching strategies.

Teaching courses in business or applied ethics is similar in certain ways to many other college courses. Students study theories, examine recent practices of individuals and organizations, discuss their thinking on cases or simulations, and take tests or exams. Later in my academic career, there was a trend toward trying to prove teaching effectiveness through forms of course assessment of student learning. It wasn’t too difficult to find a survey instrument that would display students afterwards grasped much more knowledge of this subject and claimed good intentions for future ethical conduct in their careers.

Martha Nussbaum, a prominent ethics education scholar, has long argued though that traditional teaching approaches often fail to develop the sensitivities and skills necessary for “deep” student learning and enduring commitments to “do the right thing.” While surface or shallow learning can be displayed through student performance on tests, cases or simulations, she argues that this learning often provides little influence down the road within values-challenged organizational cultures that students can encounter.

Nussbaum advocates using narrative approaches and engagement with literature and arts to develop students’ sustained ability to think critically about moral issues. She and others generally propose remedies involving more dialogical, experiential, and transformative approaches that actively engage students' whole selves rather than just their intellectual faculties.

I certainly agreed with what Nussbaum and others suggested, and I moved strongly over my own teaching career in those directions. I still have some doubts and concerns though. 

Are there enough talented teachers who can creatively select narratives and otherwise engage students in ways that really touch their diverse interests and attitudes? Even given a high quality of individual teaching ability, it seems unrealistic to expect that an ethics course or two that students schedule can have that much influence on the tough moral decisions that many individuals will face in their later lives. So many other influencing factors will be involved in their choices.

We certainly need to find, encourage, and further develop many more gifted and skillful teachers, but isn’t this an increasing challenge given recent trends toward more cynicism and distrust? We seem to need broad reforms to support outstanding teaching and to encourage organizational life where “doing the right thing” isn’t so often a difficult task.