The Psychology of Moral Development

The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

Schools have long been seen as institutions for preparing children for life, both academically and as moral agents in society. In order to become capable, moral citizens, children need to be provided with opportunities to learn moral values. However, little is known about how teachers enact social and moral values programs in the classroom. The aim of this article is to investigate the practices that Australian early years teachers describe as important for teaching moral values. To investigate early years teachers' understandings of moral pedagogy, 379 Australian teachers with experience teaching children in the early years were invited to participate in an online survey. This article focuses on responses provided to an open-ended question relating to teaching practices for moral values. The responses were analysed using an interpretive methodology. The results indicate that the most prominent approaches to teaching moral values described by this group of Australian early years teachers were engaging children in moral activities. This was closely followed by teaching practices for transmitting moral values. Engaging children in building meaning and participatory learning for moral values were least often described.

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Practices for teaching moral values in the early years: A call for a pedagogy of participation

Teachers' and children's personal epistemologies for moral education: Case studies in early years elementary education

This article concerns two classroom conversations about a moral dilemma presented in a fable. The conversations were studied as part of a larger research project on the moral understandings of young children. Two groups of primary-aged children (6 and 7 years old) in two different cultural settings discussed the conflict between a porcupine and a family of moles in ways that differed from other student discussions recorded by the author. In the first classroom discussion, students objected to the terms of the dilemma itself; in the second, students expressed concern for the character who is typically perceived by children as unsympathetic The two conversations raise questions for researchers and teachers about the relationship between individual and group deliberations about moral problems, and these lead to a broader discussion about the goals and means of moral education for young students.

Linda Farr Darling

Papers

Moles, Porcupines, and Children's Moral Reasoning: Unexpected responses