Teaching ethics isn't enough: the challenge of being ethical teachers.(Forum: reflections and epiphanies)

Last year I faced yet again an ethical dilemma similar to those you probably face. I had a good student who stopped coming to class and writing the assignments. Eventually, I heard through the advising office that his mother was near the end of a long struggle with cancer. It could have been some other tragedy: a rape, car accident, home fire. Near the end of the semester, the student returned and tried to make up the work; he managed to get a "C," and I thought a sad incident was closed. But it wasn't. He was soon back again, telling me he had lost his scholarship. Because of the enormous medical bills, his family could not afford to give him any more money for school; his scholarship was essential to his continued education. And yes, you guessed it. He was so close that he needed only one grade changed to get his scholarship back. He offered to do any work I requested to get a higher grade. I checked his story, and every word was true.

What would you have done? Would you have given him extra work, an opportunity no longer available to other students in the class? Would your answer change if he were one of several students in your class in the same situation? Would it matter that most, if not all, of your "C" students could probably bring their work up a grade notch with similar special consideration? These questions, of course, are ethics questions. And for me, they seem to be occurring more and more frequently.

Many of us now teach ethics, but we also need to think about our own ethics. I think we do not ordinarily do this. Wendy Wassyng Roworth (2002), chair of the American Association of University Professors' (AAUP's) Committee on Professional Ethics, says

Human nature seems to give us a tendency to see the ethics problems in our students' choices, but we sometimes overlook the ethics problems in our own choices. When we think about ethics, we generally mean teaching ethics to students, not examining our own ethics. Our own professional organization seems to reflect this tendency. Judging from the program titles and descriptions of the November ABC national conference on ethics, 59 sessions appeared to involve teaching ethics or examining business ethics, yet only 5 sessions appeared to involve ethics for teachers. Similarly, judging from the titles in the Journal of Business Communication and Business Communication Quarterly/Bulletin from 1990 to summer 2003, 53 articles appear to involve teaching ethics or examining business ethics, but only 2 articles seem to involve ethics for teachers.

Why should we consider our own ethics as teachers? For me, the concept of "ethical teacher" overlaps the concept of what Stephen Brookfield (1990) calls the "skillful teacher." Of course, the overlap is not complete. Weak teachers who try hard may be untalented, not unethical. Still, the overlap is significant. Ethical and skillful teachers care about students. They try to be inclusive, to hear all voices. Ethical and skillful teachers try to help all students learn as much as possible and to use that learning. Ethical and skillful teachers construct an environment that enables students to learn as easily as possible. They help bring the subject alive for their students by finding engaging examples and sharing their own passion for their subject. Ethical and skillful teachers help students connect with and internalize the course content. They help students learn to judge the content, issues, and skills pertinent to their academic discipline and connect that content and skills set with those of other disciplines. Ethical and skillful teachers enable students to recognize and appreciate excellence in their discipline. They themselves continue to learn from a variety of sources, including their students, about a variety of subjects, not just their specialty. Ethical and skillful teachers try to understand the social contexts in which students live. They keep up to date without succumbing to fads.

ISSUES THAT COMPLICATE ETHICS

So, if being an ethical teacher is vitally commingled with professional aptitude, why don't we more often explicitly consider ethics in our own teaching? One major reason for not engaging in ongoing ethics thinking is that, as we know from teaching our students, ethics theory is difficult. Applying ethics theories to teaching is not easy, even for those of us who regularly teach ethics. My own background is a case in point. I have studied ethics to teach 2-week ethics surveys to classes, use an ethics casebook, and make ethics writing assignments. I have furthered my ethics background in a week-long ethics conference and as part of a semester-long sabbatical for a study in a second discipline. I have read books by ethicists such as Aristotle, Kant, Mills, Noddings, and Gilligan, and published rive articles on teaching ethics. Yet I still struggle, as I should, with ethics dilemmas.

What I find in my studies is that even the ethics experts say no ethics theory works for all situations. For instance, Jurgen Habermas (1990) says

I might think that I want to act according to the Golden Rule, or Kant's Categorical Imperative, doing to others as I would like them to do to me. But the literature on learning styles keeps telling me that the majority of teachers have a learning style preference that is different from that of their students, so that I should not teach as I would be taught.

Perhaps I think Rawls's (1971) theory of justice would be a better fit. Working from his theory, we would develop an educational system fair to all students, working especially hard to protect socially and educationally marginalized students. Under this ethics system, I will have a strong interest in putting major effort into helping students with disabilities, poor skills, or weak preparation. But suppose I have, as many of us do, a significant number of these individuals in my class? What happens to the other students? Where does the time to help them come from? If those other students, still the majority in my classes, go to the administration and complain that some students are getting special treatment, I will be judged lacking in professionalism as well as ethics.

Do I want to be a teleological ethicist, judging my actions by their consequences? Certainly those consequences are important, but frequently they are hard to discern. I ask my students to write a paper a week, because I believe doing so will increase their writing facility and better prepare them for their jobs. But I don't know if this is true. Those who contact me after working awhile are always grateful, but we all know that they are a biased sample. Maybe I made writing traumatic for an equal number. Do I want to be a utilitarian, focusing on the greatest good for the greatest number of students? (I will not phrase it as the "greatest happiness," because generally I would hOt use "happy" as a word to describe my students when they have to write an assignment.) And how will we define "good"? Does the definition of my students (a good grade to help the grade point average [GPA]) merit equal consideration to my definition (improved writing facility)? When I act for the greatest good for the greatest number, what happens to students who are not in the majority group? What happens when what is good for them conflicts with what is good for the majority?

Ethics theories offer us many conflicting, or even mutually exclusive, avenues for improvement. As Maxine Greene (1986) notes, the more we study ethics, the more "the questions keep multiplying" (p. 498). Although as postmodernists, we all know about multiple truths, when it comes to ethics we seem to be less sophisticated. We want "The Answer." In fact, everyone who read early drafts of this article asked, "Where are the answers?" As Brookfield (1987) notes,

Clearly, theories are not particularly useful in providing "The Answer." So let me try another approach. Suppose I try to act according to central concepts of ethics. We probably all have ethics principles in which we believe: tolerance, fairness, and truthfulness. The difficulty comes in the application. Don't we all try to be tolerant? But how do I deal with attitudes I find repugnant? Do I tolerate sexist or racist attitudes? What if challenging them crushes a newly found student voice? What about fairness? Don't we all try to have fair course policies? And don't you, like me, encounter far too many occasions when those policies hinder learning for a particular student? I know I When I act for the greatest good for the greatest number, what happens to students who are not in the majority group? What happens when what is good for them conflicts with what is good for the majority? constantly question my policies. Does my class attendance policy unfairly penalize students who do "A" work without attending my classes? Does my class participation policy reward students who freely offer glib superficialities? If I accept late papers from my harried students, am I penalizing the ones who struggled to meet my deadline? Am I doing a disservice to my students who need to learn to meet the deadlines they will encounter in the workplace? Do I allow makeup exams for students without medical excuses? If so, do I make the new exam harder? One of my colleagues told me he has stopped this practice because he found that the students at his harder makeup exams were almost entirely his weakest students, and all he was doing was giving them more rope to hang themselves.

Even concepts that should seem especially clear to me, such as truth, become muddy when I try to apply them. Although I do try to avoid explicit untruthfulness, I am not always successful even there, as in cases where I am pressed for an opinion on flawed materials already submitted for a job or graduate school application. But the larger problem for me is lying by omission, not volunteering truths that might benefit students because I don't want to hurt their feelings. How much truth do I tell weak students about their writing? Don't most of us hold back some of the truth, giving students just one or two features to work on, so that the students are not too overwhelmed or discouraged?

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