Online research in philosophy

While many books focus on the broader socially ethical topics of widening participation and promoting equal opportunities, this unique book concentrates specifically on the lecturer's professional responsibilities. Bruce Macfarlane analyzes the pros and cons of prescriptive professional codes of practice employed by many universities and proposes the active development of professional virtues over bureaucratic recommendations. The material is presented in a scholarly yet accessible style and case examples are used throughout to encourage a practical, reflective approach.

A recent Carnegie Report on Nursing Education – Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation challenges the nursing profession to embrace an education model that integrates knowledge, skilled know how and ethical comportment. Placing ethics in such a prominent position in nursing education is a radical transformation. Teaching ethics must be intentional and it is integral to the development of individual nurses and the profession as a whole. The development of moral imagination has a prominent place in this new education model. The moral imagination is the ability to ponder and wonder about the inherent rightness or wrongness of decisions, choices and behaviors. This paper will review some key issues relevant to teaching ethics and then explore what nurturing the moral imagination could do for nurses as they learn to apply abstract ethics concepts to their clinical practice.

What purpose is served by renovation or redesign of professionalism, and how successful a process is it likely to be? This article addresses these questions by examining the effectiveness as a professional development mechanism of the imposition of changes to policy and/or practice that require modification or renovation of professionalism. The 'new' professionalisms purported to have been fashioned over the last two or three decades across the spectrum of UK education sectors and contexts have been the subject of extensive analysis, and this article avoids going over old ground and revisiting issues that have already been much debated. Nevertheless, the example of UK government education policy during this period is used as a basis for considering the pitfalls associated with mechanisms for modifying professionalism through a reform and standards agenda. The article's analysis incorporates redefinition and examination of the concept and substance of professionalism and offers new perspectives in the form of three distinct conceptions: demanded, prescribed and enacted professionalism. Exploring the existentialist status of 'new' or 'modified' professionalisms and the relationship between professionality, professional culture and professionalism, it examines how professionalism may be interpreted and utilised for the development of education professionals.

Ethical tasks faced by researchers in science and engineering as they engage in research include recognition of moral problems in their practice, finding solutions to those moral problems, judging moral actions and engaging in preventive ethics. Given these issues, appropriate pedagogical objectives for research ethics education include (1) teaching researchers to recognize moral issues in their research, (2) teaching researchers to solve practical moral problems in their research from the perspective of the moral agent, (3) teaching researchers how to make moral judgments about actions, and (4) learning to engage in preventive ethics. If web-based research ethics education is intended to be adequate and sufficient for research ethics education, then it must meet those objectives. However there are reasons to be skeptical that it can.

"[The authors] artfully piece together important essays in educational policy and philosophy. . . . The book deals in detail with such issues as teacher professionalization, moral responsibility of public schools, accountability, and ethical codes of practice. Must reading for teachers, administrators, and professors in schools and departments of education." --Choice.

Education and teaching are deeply contested notions, not just in the sense that there is serious disagreement about what teachers should teach and how they should teach it, but also insofar as there seem to be widely divergent conceptions of the occupational status of education and teaching as such. Indeed, it is one indication of the complexity of teaching that it would, over the years, appear to have invited comparison with a wide range of other professions, vocations, trades and services. However, there are also grounds for supposing that these different conceptions of the occupational status of education and teaching are not just rival but incompatible, and that such incompatibility might be manifested in diverse implications for the moral educational role of the teacher. This article is concerned to identify and explore such implications.

Machine generated contents note: Preface (Richard Smith) -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction : Why We Need a Virtue Ethics of Teaching. Saints and scoundrels ; A brief for teacherly self-cultivation ; From the terrain of teaching to the definition of professional ethics ; Outline of the argument -- PART I. The Virtues of Vocation : From Moral Professionalism to Practical Ethics -- Chapter 1. Work and Flourishing : Williams' Critique of Morality and its Implications for Professional Ethics. Retrieving Socrates' question ; Modern moral myopia ; What do moral agents want? ; From moral professionalism to professional ethics -- Chapter 2. Worlds of Practice : MacIntyre's Challenge to Applied Ethics. The architecture of MacIntyre's moral theory ; A closer look at internal goods ; The practicality of ethical reflection ; What counts as a practice : The proof, the pudding, and the recipe ; Boundary conditions : Practitioners, managers, interpreters, and fans -- Chapter 3. Labour, Work, and Action : Arendt's Phenomenology of Practical Life. Arendt's Singular Project ; Defining the Deed ; Hierarchy and interdependence in the vita activa ; Praxis in the professions -- Chapter 4. A Question of Experience : Dewey and Gadamer on Practical Wisdom. The constant gardener ; The existential and aesthetic dimensions of vocation ; Our dominant vocation ; Practical wisdom and the circle of experience ; The open question -- PART II. A Virtue Ethics for Teachers : Problems and Prospects -- Chapter 5. The Hunger Artist: Pedagogy and the Paradox of Self-Interest. A blind spot in the educational imagination ; The hunger artist ; The very idea of a helping profession ; This ripeness of self -- Chapter 6. Working Conditions : The Practice of Teaching and the Institution of School. A prima facie case for teaching as a practice ; MacIntyre's Objection ; Schools as surroundings -- Chapter 7. The Classroom Drama : Teaching as Endless Rehearsal and Cultural Elaboration. Education as the drama of cultural renewal ; A false lead ; Teaching as labour, work, and action ; Education, shelter, and mediation ; Teaching as endless rehearsal ; Teaching as cultural elaboration -- Chapter 8. Teaching as Experience : Toward a Hermeneutics of Teaching and Teacher Education. Teaching as vocational environment ; Batch processing, kitsch culture, and other obstacles to teacher vocation ; The syntax of educational claims ; The shape of humanistic conversation ; Horizons of educational inquiry ; Teacher education for practical wisdom -- Index.

This paper explores the issue of personal factors that impinge upon education. More specifically, it addresses professional jealousy among teachers and how it affects the moral practice of teaching. Our focus is teachers? emotions in general and teachers? jealousies in particular, in the context of the ideal of the moral teacher. We identify and criticise three common dichotomies that tend to mar explorations of teachers? emotions. We illustrate issues of professional jealousy as revealed in an interview with a headteacher in Taiwan, explaining the societal context and eliciting the emotional issues. We argue that too little attention is given to the moral practice of teaching qua emotional labour: labour that places moral burdens on teachers as individual human beings. We maintain that teacher training must focus more on the moral and emotional self-education of teacher trainees and professional teachers, helping them to lead well-rounded lives as integrated personal and professional beings.

Various attempts to specify the nature of professions in general and of teaching in particular in relation to the knowledge that is needed for practice are considered. It is argued that there is no epistemic or moral criterion of professionalism that will sustain the claim of teaching to be a profession. The nature of teachers' knowledge is examined and the relationship between theory and application is seen to be both crucial to and problematic in our understanding of the nature of teachers' work. The implications of the discussion for teacher education are assessed.