Teacher Leaders: Demonstrating the Ethic of the Profession
Genre
Thesis/DissertationDate
2009Author
Renehan, Cynthia LeeAdvisor
Shapiro, Joan PolinerCommittee member
Caldwell, Corrinne A.Schifter, Catherine
DuCette, Joseph P.
Partlow, Michelle Chaplin
Department
Educational AdministrationSubject
Education, AdministrationClashes Between Codes
Codes of Ethics
Ethic of the Profession
Ethical Decision-making
Ethical Paradigms
Teacher Leadership
Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12613/2229Metadata
Show full item recordDOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/2211Abstract
This case study investigated the ethic of the profession, one of the four ethical frameworks used for ethical decision-making in education. Typically, this line of research is applied to school administrators; however, this investigation extended this research to teacher leaders by examining their daily practice. Out of a pool of thirty-six respondents, nine teachers were chosen to participate in the study. These teacher leaders were employed in urban, exurban, and suburban school districts, with experience levels varying from three to thirty-three years. Participants were required to complete the following: the Self-Assessment to Assess Readiness for Leadership, creation of personal code of ethics, and the creation of professional code of ethics. An in-depth interview to discuss the codes, and clashes between codes was conducted, as well as a second interview to address an ethical dilemma identified by the participants. Categorical analysis was used to recognize recurring themes. A conceptual model of the decision-making process was developed to explain the phenomena observed in these data. In addition, recurring themes were identified through analysis of the interview data. Themes included a prevailing concern for fairness, student welfare, educational equality, safety, and student discipline. When responding to critical events that triggered ethical dilemmas, these participants habitually used their personal and professional codes of ethics to determine a course of action. Participants exhibited a sophisticated decision-making approach which moved participants past the reliance on one ethical frame of justice, critique, or care, into the use of multiple paradigms to solve ethical dilemmas. In the final analyses, the ethic of the profession was demonstrated by these nine teacher leaders through reflection and reliance on personal and professional codes of ethics, and by placing students at the center of the ethical decision-making process.ADA compliance
For Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodation, including help with reading this content, please contact scholarshare@temple.eduCollections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
THE ETHICS OF CARE AND GLOBAL SOCIO-EMOTIONAL COMMONS: AMELIORATING AND DISSOLVING THE EFFECTS OF GLOBAL CARE CHAINSIn recent decades, care ethics has become more visible in discussions of contemporary moral problems; however, longstanding ethical theories such as deontology and utilitarianism remain prominent in discussing controversial contemporary issues. I show the relevance of care ethics in discussions of globalization, especially regarding care ethics's applicability to the problem of "global care chains." Global care chains form when a person from a developing nation, usually a female, emigrates to serve as a fulltime nanny or housekeeper for a middle or upper class household. Her remittances pay for another care worker to replace her at home during her absence. This chain of caring labor extends across oceans and involves multiple households and various intricate webs of relationship. Care chains are problematic for three reasons. First, immigrant care workers find themselves particularly vulnerable to manipulation and abuse at the hands of their wealthy employers: Generally, labor laws in most countries do not apply to workers in private households. Second, the consistent migration of female care workers from poorer to wealthier countries eventually damages the socio-emotional commons in these workers' home communities. Third, care chains maintain the global illusion that women have achieved genuine equality with men: Because the gendered division of labor persists in the private and public sphere along with the masculine career model, women generally still find themselves burdened with the second-shift of caring labor in their homes. In response, I propose the use of "caring contracts" to address these conflicts. First, the caring contract shows how care ethics's feminist priorities can work in conjunction with the liberally derived concept of contractual arrangements between seemingly distant parties. Second, caring contracts prohibit the abuse of immigrant care workers while motivating a global conversation regarding the patriarchal and masculinist norms that have encouraged women's reliance on care chains. Privileged men and women will have to reconsider the true value of care work and understand why all capable individuals should participate in its completion. This dialogue would have to include revising global economic polices that have forced women in developing countries to emigrate for employment opportunities.
-
Meditation and Neural Connections: Changing Sense(s) of Self in East Asian Buddhist and Neuroscientific DescriptionsSince its inception in the 1960s, the scientific research of Buddhist-based meditation practices have grown exponentially with hundreds of new studies every year in the past decade. Some researchers are using Buddhist teachings, such as not-self, as an explanation for the causal mechanism of meditation’s effectiveness, for conditions such as stress, anxiety, and depression. However, there has been little response from Buddhist studies scholars to these proposed mechanisms in the growing discourse surrounding the engagement of ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Science.’ I argue that the mechanistic causal explanations of meditation offered by researchers provide an incomplete understanding of meditative practices. I focus on two articles, by David Vago and his co-authors, that have been cited over nine hundred and three hundred times. I make explicit internal criticisms of their work from their peers in neuroscience, and offer external criticisms of their understanding of the cognitive aspects of meditation by using an extended, enactive, embodied, embedded, and affective (4EA) model of cognition. I also use Chinese Huayan Buddhist mereology and causation to provide a corrective for a more holistic understanding. The constructive aspect of my project combines 4EA cognition with Huayan mereology and causation in order to propose new directions of research on how meditative practices may lead to a changing sense of self that does not privilege neurobiological mechanisms. Instead, I argue a fruitful understanding of change in ethical behavior is a changing sense of self using support from a consummate meditator in the Japanese Zen Buddhist context: Dōgen and his text Shoakumakusa. Contemporary research looking for mechanistic causation focuses on the physical body, specifically the brain, without considering how the mind is involved in meditative practices. The group of researchers I focus on reduce the senses of self to localized parts of the brain. In contrast, according to Mahayana Buddhist terminology, Huayan offers a nondualistic understanding of the self that does not privilege the brain. Rather, Huayan characterizes the self as a mind-body complex and meditation is understood to involve the whole of the person. My critique notes how the methodology used in these studies focuses too much on the localized, explicit, and foreground, but not enough on the whole, implicit, and background processes in meditative practices. Bringing in Huayan also offers a constructive aspect to this engagement of Buddhist studies and neuroscience as there are implications of its mereology for a more complete understanding of not just meditation, but also of neuroplasticity. To be clear, the corrective is only meant for the direction of research that focuses on neural-mechanistic explanations of meditation. Surely, there is value in scientific research on meditative practices. However, that emphasis on neural mechanisms gives a misleading impression of being able to fully explain meditative practices. I argue that a more fruitful direction of engagement between Buddhist traditions and scientific research is the small but growing amount of experiments conducted on how meditative practices lead to ethical change. This direction provides a more complete characterization of how meditative practices changes the senses of self.
-
The Ethical Application of Force-Feeding: a Closer Look at Medical Policy Involving the Treatment of Hunger-Striking POWs and DetaineesHunger strikes are used as a method of protest to call attention to grievances or political positions and galvanize support for a cause. Historical examples from pre-Christian Europe through Guantanamo Bay have demonstrated various motives, interventions, and outcomes to this unique form of protest. Starvation causes life-threatening damage to the body, and to intervene on an unwilling subject involves invasive medical procedures. As scholars have debated how to approach this medical-ethical dilemma, a tug-of-war exists between autonomy, beneficence, and social justice with regard to the rights of prisoners of war (POWs) and detainees. International documents, legislation, and case law demonstrate vast support for and place precedence on the prisoners right to make their own autonomous, informed medical decisions, and many in the international community lean towards abstaining from intervention on hunger strikes on the basis of patient autonomy. However, there are notable arguments both for and against force-feeding that have been well documented. Despite the vast international dialogue, there is a key component that seems to have been forgotten—the environment within which the prisoner or detainee resides is immersed with coercive and manipulative activity and interrogation on a regular basis. This environment may impede the ability for the POW or detainee to make an autonomous decision and then leads to the refusal of life-saving, medical intervention on the basis of a decision that is markedly coerced or manipulated. It is therefore noted that a different lens must be used to analyze hunger strike situations for this specific population.
