Important Perspectives and Concepts to Teach in Ethics Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper, "Important perspectives and concepts to teach in ethics education", has the potential to provide some much needed and original insights into ethics education in Sweden. In general, ethics/moral education is a very important, especially in the globalised, 'post-truth' world, and it is an area of the curriculum that has long been fraught with problems and controversy, especially as it seems to involves passing on values  to students, which raises the questions of whose values/which values should be transmitted and how can this be done in a way that doesn't constitute, or at least look like, indoctrination. When this is done within the domain of RE it is even more potentially problematic because RE is just as subject to controversy, if not more so. All of this makes the subject area difficult for teachers to teach, as existing literature shows.

However, in the current form, the paper is not fit for publication. In particular, the focus and writing and structure is unclear and the paper is not well-situated within the existing literature about ethics education. The paper does not clearly identify a central research problem, question or hypothesis.

More feedback is provided below:

1.     A focus of the paper is seeming meant to be “powerful knowledge” and, as such, it would have been helpful to have a clearer account of what powerful knowledge is and of the key literature that defines what this concept means within the literature review. Currently, this is not provided, which makes the paper confusing to follow. The concept is mentioned and some literature referred to but it is not clearly explained.

2.             Lack of clear focus and sigfnicant research problem: The overall paper lacks a clear focus – teachers perspectives about what to teach in ethics education is very broad and a bit unclear and this lack of clarity is reflected in the rest of the paper.  The lack of clear focus means that the paper is not properly situated within a relevant body of literature. One key reason I suspect the paper seems confusing to me and lacking focus is because, despite some overlap, ethics and RE are distinct subject areas and much of the literature on ethics education doesn’t include discussion of RE. The focus of this paper is apparently supposed to be ethics education. However, in the context of the study, ethics is taught within RE. Many other curricula and programs teach ethics without looking at religion and the literature on those sorts of curricula is not really discussed here. Although, there is also literature that focuses on curricula that integrates RE and ethics yet that literature is not discussed here (e.g., the literature on Quebec’s ethical and religious culture program). Furthermore, the explanation of the RE curriculum focused on here doesn’t properly explain the connection between religion and ethics within this subject. For example, are RE and ethics taught as different units/topics within the program or are they integrated throughout? Do students study a range of religious and non-religious perspectives and, if so, which ones? When they study ethical issues do they look at all those issues from the point of view of each of the religions studied? Is one religious perspective promoted over others? Are students expected to critically compare different religious perspectives in relation to ethical issues (which raises a range of issues as explained in the existing literature) or are religions treated in a relativistic, neutral way (also raises issues as discussed in the literature). In itself, such approaches to teaching ethics and RE are subject to a range of serious issues explored in existing literature (for example, see the many papers that have been written about the controversial ethics and religious culture curriculum taught in Quebec). Those papers examine the many problems with such curricula, which raises serious concerns and doubts about the ability of such programs to foster powerful knowledge and democratic ideals – that curriculum has since been scrapped partly because of those issues.

3.           Unclear what the point is in the second paragraph on page 3, e.g., begins “To avoid a teaching that simplifies the content,”. I was not sure how this connected to the focus of the paper or the preceding paragraph. In fact, it is unclear why you need to discuss general literature about powerful knowledge in RE when your focus is really just on ethics. Unless that literature discusses ethics specifically it probably isn’t worth including as you are not looking at RE in general, just the ethics component of an RE course.

4.             Literature review: In general, the whole literature review focuses on a range of different theories and concepts that are not well-connected to each other or the central focus of the study and are not necessarily central to ethics education, although they can be used for your theoretical framework for your data analysis, which seems to be the point of including them. However, as mentioned previously, there is no proper discussion of more obviously relevant literature, including existing literature on teacher’s perspectives on ethics/moral and/or, more broadly, values education or on different types of ethics/moral education and some of the key issues with it (although you cite some such studies,  e.g., Thornberg, Robert., and Oğuz, Ebru. 2013, you don’t properly discuss the key issues they raise). The paper is just not framed well by a discussion of existing literature on ethics/moral education or, at least, teachers perceptions of it, yet lots of other less clearly relevant literature is discussed but often not well explained.

5.             Too many unclear theoretical concepts: The author(s) use many different theoretical concepts from different theorists, e.g.,  three gifts, powerful knowledge, post-truth but they are not explained clearly and not well-connected up to each other. You need to explain the key concepts more clearly and how they connect to each other within the literature review and perhaps you need to narrow it down more to fewer key concepts.

6.            . Methodology: It’s unclear if the thematic analysis was inductive or deductive or both – did you analyse the data using exiting themes from theories/literature or did you just analyse the data to see what themes emerged and then identify existing theories or literature that related to these emergent themes or did you do both – i.e., have some starting themes and then also have other themes that emerged during the analysis. In general, it is unclear where the themes came from/how they emerged.

7.             Because of the issues above with a lack of clarity with the literature review and theories and themes, the analysis of the interview data is also unclear and unfocused and it is unclear what the significance of the findings are and how they relate to a central, sigfnicant problem/research question.

8.             Sometimes the claims made are not clearly supported by relevant exemplars from the data, e.g., at the end of page 6, you say that “All eight teachers emphasize that they want their students to become good and democratic fellow human beings.” But then you don’t provide any quotes here that clearly demonstrate the teachers saying this.

9.            The themes and sub-headings in the data analysis are vague and too general and not always clearly distinguished from each other. Isn’t their overlap between “Ethical perspectives related to society locally and globally” and “Ethical perspectives related to the students’ experiences in school and at home”? Aren’t their perspectives at home and at school part of their local perspectives. In general, the significance of, and focus of, each theme is often unclear.  

10. It’s unclear of ethics approval was sort and granted by the authors institution

 

The writing could be clearer throughout. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper addresses a fundamental topic in both ethics education and ethics more generally, and I feel it has the potential to make an excellent contribution to current debate. However, it is a little hamstrung at the moment by forcing too many concepts into a rather loose structure, and this affects the persuasiveness of the argument considerably. I would recommend redrafting the structure of the paper, which allows the focus and purpose of the paper to be absolutely clear from the start.

 

The main issue I have is that there are a lot of concepts and ideas raised, but often moved over very quickly. For example, you talk about post-truth and democracy, but much is assumed about what these terms mean and how they should be dealt with in an educational context. I feel that there is an argument to be made about the relationship between truth, language and the facilitation of discussion, but the thread is not quite pulled through at the moment because the paper does not unpack these in relation to each other. Indeed, the final concluding paragraph makes no reference to these things.

 

One way of refining these points may be to consider some views against the relatively traditional approach assumed here, e.g. Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, or perhaps even my The Problem with Stupid. This may help to clarify what the core ambiguities are regarding PK in the context of ethics. I would also suggest shortening the first section to one or two paragraphs that hone in on the core issues, and bring in some of the other points at a later stage in the discussion.

 

As a result, perhaps, of this, I was not always clear on what the purpose of the interviews was. At points they appear to be taken as representative, at others more about unpacking the contextualised delivery of Biesta's model. I would suggest emphasising the latter far more than the former in a future draft of the paper.

 

At the moment the non-egological approach feels like one step too many in your argument - it is raised every so often but sits a little awkwardly. I would really like to see this more boldly central to the argument; as before, spelling out early on the relationship between this, PK and the risks of ethics education would enable this. The article does this to a point (aligning post-truth with a denial of reality - which is an over-simplification), but it's only in passing and not developed further.

 

My final observation is that the conclusion is rather disappointing - the third-to-last paragraph reveals that the discussion only tells us things we know already, and the empirical data does not engage with the theories raised earlier. This is not an inspiring end to the paper, and working through the purpose of the interviews in relation to the literature may help to define what the paper's contribution is - at the moment this is not so convincing.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

This resubmitted paper is a great improvement, and I found the argument much more compelling and concise. It stands as a solid contribution to the discussion of ethics education. I have no further suggestions for improvement.