What is moral about teaching? A philosophical inquiry into the morally salient features of teaching.

Education has long been understood as a moral as well as intellectual endeavor. The last several decades have been particularly rich in producing a literature on moral education. This literature is both programmatic and scholarly in nature, yet unfortunately attends little to the conceptual and theoretical resources available in the field of ethics and moral philosophy, as well as its own theoretical underpinnings. These failures impoverish the work in moral education by confusing readers as to just what the moral features of teaching are, in what sense they are moral, how moral messages are conveyed by teachers, and how they might be understood and discussed by practitioners, teacher educators and researchers of teaching. Using philosophical analysis and argumentation, this dissertation demonstrates the implications of not attending to these theoretical issues, by examining the nature of morality, and what it would take to develop a comprehensive and sound understanding of how morality is manifest in teaching practice. In doing so, a theoretically descriptive approach to inquiring into the moral features of teaching is developed. Following this approach, a framework that describes a wide range of the moral characteristics of our lives is presented, and is used to identify three importantly different ways in which a given feature of teaching might be considered moral in nature. That is, this dissertation presents a perspective, and a set of theoretical resources for assisting educators to understand what is moral about teaching.PhDEducationEducational philosophyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123468/2/3079523.pd