Engaging with ethics: Ethical inquiry for teachers

This book adopts a unique approach to the teaching of professional ethics in general and to ethics for schoolteachers in particular. It addresses ethics by inviting the reader to engage with the ethical dimensions of practices pertaining to their profession through the method of the community of philosophical inquiry. This approach to ethics education is designed to help students bridge the gap between theories about ethics and their practical experiences as beginning professionals. The text does not assume that students, or instructors who use it with students, have any formal background in philosophy. Instead, it can be used successfully by anyone prepared to follow the suggestions about how to guide a philosophical discussion. The first part of the book articulates the framework for the approach taken while the second part provides a series of fictional ethical vignettes the main characters of which are schoolteachers and their students. This book should make a valuable resource for teaching about professional ethics at undergraduate and graduate levels, as well as for use in seminars, workshops, and professional development programs for teachers in ethics and philosophy in the classroom. It may also be a source of ideas and teaching material for use with high school students studying ethics.