ANN ARBOR—A University of Michigan education professor is testing a revolutionary theory of moral education for professionals.

“The most critical issue professionals face is to integrate our values?be they centered in a faith tradition or universal humanist claims?into the ways we behave in troubling situations,” said Ed St. John, the Algo D. Henderson Collegiate Professor in the U-M’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. “People often use their espoused beliefs to rationalize troubling practices, a pervasive pattern of conduct that has left us at war and facing a serious financial crisis.”

St. John rethinks the basic assumptions of widely used moral development theory as they apply to adulthood and professional action, focusing on integrating moral reasoning into practice?the actual daily situations confronted on the job?based on values.

“This is not just a matter of claiming we know what is right based on our faith, a theory, or the law. Rather, it requires that we reflect critically, and yes, spiritually, on how our values can inform action in difficult circumstances,” he said.

According to St. John, it is crucial to redesign professional education so that practitioners from different faiths and values systems understand how and why the way they conduct their practices may raise serious problems, even moral challenges, rather than disavowing personal responsibility.

The core issue addressed by St. John, in a series of studies, is how professionals in education contend with complex moral problems. Most moral development theory has focused on stages of moral reasoning within the constraints of laws and moral codes, or with a more enlightened frame, like Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

St. John found that the reality of moral reasoning in professional practice is situational. People reason consistently with regulations in one instance and not in another.

St. John points to the example of teachers confronting the problem of having a curriculum that doesn’t fit the learning needs of their students.

Teachers could supplement the curriculum for underprepared and accelerated students, abandon the curriculum and focus on student learning needs, or just ignore the problem and teach the curriculum, even if it was too advanced for some students and boring for others.

“Faced with this type of challenge, teachers who follow the curriculum are compliant and following the rules,” he said. “In this case, conventional moral reasoning ends up adding to achievement problems rather than solving them.”

St. John elaborates on his approach, combining analytic critiques of theories of justice, moral development, human development and professional practice in his new book, “Action, Reflection and Social Justice: Integrating Moral Reasoning into Professional Development.”

For more on St. John and his work, visit:

http://sitemaker.soe.umich.edu/soe/faculty_introduction&mode=single&recordID=97778

Education