Facilitating the development of integrity and ethical practice via the higher education classroom

There is agreement between national governments, employers, teaching practitioners and researchers that one of the foundational objectives of higher education is to teach not only higher order knowledge but key generic, transferable or employability skills, with such skills seen as essential in allowing graduates to make the transition between the worlds of learning and work (Simatele, 2015). These skills have been variously defined, but lists typically include those relevant for professional environments, and for participation in the community as an engaged citizen. This paper describes how transferable skills in ethical decision-making and practice, as well as the personal attributes of integrity and tolerance, can be developed within the classroom. It is based on the review of three courses, one taught to undergraduate students and the others to graduate students. The first, an applied ethics course, is available to students from across multiple programs. The graduate courses are both framed with regards to professional ethical development requirements, one addressing pre-service teachers and the other graduates in the information and communication technologies sectors. Under discursive examination here are modes of teaching and presentation of curricula, as well as students’ own beliefs regarding their development as ethical thinkers. Our discussion of student beliefs and their evaluation of our teaching practices will be based upon a variety of self-reporting mechanisms active during course delivery between 2012 and 2015: formal and informal qualitative feedback received from course and teaching evaluations, unsolicited correspondence and feedback received from students, as well as self-reports collected annually