Graduate School of Education
"A decade ago, the last thing that I thought I would be studying (in my trade as a developmental psychologist) was professional ethics. But my own thinking, along with events in the country, propelled me in that direction. It was my good fortune to discover that there was an active cohort of thinkers and empirical researchers already at Harvard, within a stone's throw of my office. My relation to the Ethics Center has been wonderfully asymmetric from my view - as the director of Harvard's GoodWork Project I have received far more than I have given."
Howard Gardner, from the Ethics Center's 20th Anniversary Report
An almost daily challenge for many educators and education policymakers, ethical issues are a common thread in teaching and research at the Graduate School of Education. At Harvard, faculty and student engagement in areas such as equality, respect for individual differences, and the tension between ethical imperatives and economic realities has inspired scholarship and initiatives with an enduring impact on practice all over the world. Two Center Faculty Associates, Howard Gardner and Catherine Elgin, are among those who are doing important ethics-related work at the School. For over a decade, Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education and a 1981 MacArthur Fellow, has provided leadership for the GoodWork Project, a large-scale, multi-site study of ethics in professions that are experiencing rapid change. His courses include "Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet." In 2006, Gardner received a MacArthur Foundation grant to study ethical issues that arise in young persons' use of digital media. Catherine Elgin's areas of expertise include philosophy of language, philosophy of art, and epistemology. Her work considers how ethical, aesthetic, and factual commitments are interwoven in human understanding. Elgin's popular "Philosophy of Education" course considers both the ethical obligations of educators and the possibility of moral education.
Growing interest in teaching and learning about ethics in education has led to a dramatic increase in the number of courses that focus on ethical issues. Examples include offerings such as: "The Elusive Quest for Equality," which looks at changing concepts of equality in U.S. education; cross-culturally focused courses such as "Education, Poverty, and Inequality in Latin America" and "Implementing Educational Change for Social Justice in Marginalized Settings"; "Social and Moral Development," which considers moral psychology; and "The Promotion of Social and Moral Development," which was awarded the Provost Grant for Innovation in Technology in 2003-04. A multidisciplinary course on legal and ethical issues in child advocacy involves students from GSE, the Law School, and School of Public Health in the study of legal requirements and codes of ethics in different professions engaged in child advocacy.
In addition to courses where ethics is a principal focus, the ethical requirements that arise in research on children and other vulnerable populations are a dominant concern in all of the School's qualitative and quantitative methodology courses. Field research, the role of the participant observer, and the relationship between interviewers and their subjects are recurrent themes, as are the ethical dilemmas inherent in the choice of research orientation, vocabulary, and methods.
Lectures, conferences, debates, and collaborations between ethics scholars and professionals raise awareness and plant the seeds for further progress in the field. Each year, the Askwith Education Forum and the Principals Center invite distinguished speakers to deliver lectures on topics such as the No Child Left Behind Act, youth violence in the media, schools and the moral contract, zero tolerance rules, the importance of preschool to economic development, affirmative action in education, high-stakes testing, and citizenship education and immigration in the United States. The 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education was observed in 2004 with symposia that investigated the ongoing challenge of assuring fair and equal access to education. The School hosted two major sequential events: the Facing History and Ourselves conference on adolescent citizenship, and the annual meeting of the Association for Moral Education, an international, interdisciplinary organization founded by students and colleagues of the late Professor Lawrence Kohlberg to further research on the moral dimensions of educational theory and practice. Harvard Law School professor and former Center for Ethics acting director Martha Minow delivered the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture at the event.
Innovative programs that connect scholarship with the world of practice create opportunities for students and faculty to become involved in local and international initiatives where ethics is a central concern. Project Aspire, a collaborative partnership with the School's Risk and Prevention Program, Judge Baker Children's Center, and Boston Public Schools, focuses on issues such as racism, sexism, teasing, and bullying and provides school-based services, training, and support for students, teachers, and administrators. One of several degree programs that focus on ethics and civic education, the Master's program in International Education Policy integrates curricular, extracurricular, and service opportunities to help educators become skilled at fostering justice and equality across the world. Established in 2004, the Global Education Office has sponsored, among other events, a conference in Costa Rica on civic education and democratic citizenship, in collaboration with the Oscar Arias Foundation for Peace.
In-progress books and articles by faculty, as well as dissertations by doctoral students, develop from and contribute to the School's research and curriculum and shed light on challenges as they evolve in education and contemporary society. The study of ethics has become an integral element in the School's overall mission of identifying and disseminating the most innovative research and best practice in the field.
"The opportunity to work with such a diverse set of colleagues from various fields steered me in an interdisciplinary direction in which I had already wanted to go. I made several contacts at the School of Education, attended classes on racism, and on multiculturalism and religious pluralism in schools, and I continued my involvement in the Cambridge Public Schools. In the summer at the end of my fellowship year, I taught my first full-scale course in multicultural and antiracist education at UMass, Boston, and intend to do more teaching in this area."
Lawrence Blum, from Report on the Ethics Fellowship Year 1992-93