No abstract

This article addresses the current debates about the definition and assessment of dispositions in teacher education. Competing perspectives on the definitions and assessment of dispositions in teacher education are examined and critiqued, and a renewed commitment to foregrounding the moral nature of teaching is suggested. Recommendations for understanding and assessing the moral in teacher education, including the development of a code of ethics for the profession, are provided.

Teacher education faces the dual challenges of preparing preservice teachers for an increasingly diverse student body and recruiting, retaining, and graduating greater numbers of culturally diverse teachers (Zeichner, 1993(Zeichner, , 1996. The dramatic mismatch in diversity between preservice teachers and students in schools in the United States complicates the task. Although most preservice teachers are White, female, middle-class monolingual speakers of English with few experiences with people different from themselves (Howey & Zimpher,

No abstract

This paper presents research on the moral sensibility of six pre-service teachers in an undergraduate teacher education program. Using their reflective writing across their first two semesters of coursework as well as focus group interviews in their third semester as sources of data, the paper identifies and describes three distinctive types of moral sensibility and examines ways in which moral sensibility interacts with experiences in teacher education. Suggestions for explicitly incorporating the moral in pre-service teacher education are presented.In current times, when teaching in the United States and elsewhere is increasingly framed in the language of meeting objective learning outcomes or standards, we would do well to remember that teaching is ultimately a moral practice (Hansen, 2001b) and has been considered as such for a very long time. Regardless of the specific historical moment and political context, teaching occurs in a moral relationship between those who teach and those who learn. Given this moral relationship, conceptualizing teaching as largely a matter of knowledge and specific teaching skills is far too narrow; as Hansen (2001a) argues, teachers should also be concerned with 'fueling the human flourishing' (p. 44) of their students or, as Fallona (2000) states, developing in them to their fullest capacity 'the qualities that make life excellent or admirable ' (p. 681). Considering teaching from a moral point of view, philosophers, educators and researchers throughout history have recognized that teachers' personal qualities, personality variables, virtues, values and commitments (see Gage, 1963;Getzels and Jackson, 1963), and the ways in which these are expressed in actions, conduct, manner (Fenstermacher, 1992) and style (Jackson et al., 1993) are critical factors in learning.Put another way, 'who teachers are is often decisive for what students learn or fail to learn in the classroom' (Hansen, 2001b, p. 837). To examine 'who teachers are', or in our case more accurately, who pre-service teachers are, we draw from Hansen's description (2001a) of moral sensibility as an orientation of attentiveness to students and to the profession of teaching.According to Hansen (2001a), a moral sensibility, reflected in both thought and emotion and apparent in the 'way in which a teacher thinks and acts ' (p. 33; emphasis in original), connects 2 Chubbuck, Burant, & Whipp both who a teacher is as well as his/her conduct 'under a unifying outlook or orientation ' (p. 39) towards every aspect of the profession. In other words, a moral sensibility is an orientation towards the student and the profession that serves as the foundation of teacher thought and action.Although the current discourse of assessment in the United States frequently sidesteps consideration of the moral, recent debate over defining, identifying and assessing teacher dispositions, ironically, has prompted a shift in that direction. In a battle between the field of teacher education and the popular press, teacher educators ha...