Session Information
Session 8B, Problems of Moral Education (Part 2)
Papers
Time:
2005-09-09
11:00-12:30
Room:
ENG
Chair:
Bo Dahlin
Contribution
Values and Knowledge Education" (VaKE; see Patry, 2002, for details) is a didactical approach which consists in using dilemma discussions - as in moral education in the tradition of Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) - to trigger knowledge acquisition. A dilemma is presented and discussed, the students recognize that their knowledge is not sufficient to argue competently, they search for the necessary information and proceed to a dilemma discussion on a higher level. The following philosophical premises are briefly discussed as they apply to VaKE: The ethical discourse depends heavily on the knowledge base with respect to the underlying facts (an example from the discussion of the question "Is Woyzeck guilty" will be provided - Woyzeck is the protagonist of a famous German drama by Büchner, 1988). Nevertheless, the meta-ethical position of non-naturalism (including prescriptivism and the justification of norms) is not only a prerequisite for the academic ethical discourse, but also for values discussions in school Constructivism (in the sense of Glasersfeld, 1995, and Piaget) is an appropriate background theory both on the meta-theoretical and on the object-theoretical levels. The VaKE approach was used in a central-European summer camp for gifted students from seven different countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia); the camp was conceived as horizontal enrichment. Since VaKE can be applied to most topics in the different school disciplines, five workshops with different foci were offered, with nine students in each of them. One workshop addressed explicitly the EU issue, the others were on history (French revolution), science (cloning of humans), communication (RFID technique), and the activities of the International Committee of the Red Cross (interventions in a country at war).The summer camps were evaluated using questionnaires, sociographic analyses, the lesson interruption method (Patry, 1997 - a special observation technique to assess the momentary motivation and the like of the students and whether the learning situation is in accordance with the requirements of constructivism), and further observation. The first experience is that after VaKE, the students know more about the topic than the workshop leaders - this could not be investigated with achievement tests because it could not be anticipated in what direction the discourse would go and therefore in what domains the students would become particularly competent. The results of the analyses of the dependent variables which were assessed are presented and discussed with particular emphasis on the ethical discourse, on constructivist learning, and on the knowledge acquired by the learners and applied in the values discourse. The discussion deals with the appropriateness of the approach for moral education within regular classrooms.References:Büchner, G. 1988: Woyzeck. Frankfurt: Cornelsen.Glasersfeld, E. von 1995: Radical constructivism. A way of knowing and learning. London: The Falmer Press. Kohlberg, L. 1984: Essays on moral development, Vol 2: The psychology of moral development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.Patry, J.-L. 1997: The lesson interruption method in assessing situation-specific behavior in classrooms. Psychological Reports, 81, 272-274.Patry, J.-L. 2002: Science is not values-free - neither in research, nor in school. Salzburger Beiträge zur Erziehungswissenschaft, 6, 1, 5-14. URL: http://www.sbg.ac.at/erz/salzburger_beitraege/fruehling_200 2/patry.pdf (Jan 31,2004)
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.