Changing conditions for teacher professionalism have consequences for teachers’ professional ethics. In many countries increased demands of accountability and measurement, rapid educational policy reforms and an expansive role of law in education have implications for how teachers’ professional ethics is formulated and made (Ball, 2008; Biesta, 2009; Sahlberg, 2010). In this paper we analyze how a professional teacher union negotiates teacher ethics under these conditions.

Our research question is: How is teachers’ professional ethics negotiated and made in a condition of accountability? Analyses of professional ethical codes are often limited to the final text. The debates prior to the final code are, however, also interesting. They are sources to which kind of disagreements, contradictions and negotiations that are central in teachers’ reasoning about ethics in their profession. In this paper we analyze a series of documents prior to the Union of Education Norway’s final “Professional ethics for the teaching profession”(Union of Education Norway [Utdanningsforbundet], 2012), where different versions of the code and relevant issues are debated. A horizon for our analysis is what can be called an increasing focus on accountability in Norwegian education (Mausethagen, 2013). Here accountability is used in a broad sense, as an umbrella-concept of a variety of developments in transnational, national and local educational policy and practice, focusing on measurable outcome and following an instrumental logic. Accountability in this sense is often contrasted by responsibility, leading the attention to issues of trust, morality, processes and a value-based logic (Sahlberg, 2010, 2011; Solbrekke & Englund, 2011). In the making of a professional ethical code responsibility is negotiated and fixated. In our analysis we explore in some detail how responsibility is done and not done by teachers. This means that our aim is to contribute to a somewhat detailed account of how teachers’ responsibility is negotiate and claimed in a situation of accountability. We argue that it is important not only to analyze accountability vs responsibility, but how responsibility is negotiated and done in different ways by teachers in a process of making a common ethics for the profession.

This means that we do not analyze professional ethics in action and interaction, but how it is made in texts. In analyzing not only the final code, it is possible to get access to the variety of discussions and perspectives. We are particularly interested in contradictions and disagreements. Disagreements may be an indication of difficult issues, where negotiations of different demands take place.

Norway and the Union of Education Norway is a good case of the process of negotiating teachers’ professional ethics and responsibility. Norway has been subject to a number of educational reforms emphasizing accountability, and a broad public discourse related to what many would consider as unsuccessful test-results (PISA, TIMMS etc) (Afdal, 2012). Related to this teacher relative autonomy has decreased, including professional ethical autonomy. Against this backdrop the Union of Education Norway in 2009 started the process of establishing a professional ethical code.

This analysis draws on two different theoretical debates. One is the one on accountability, responsibility and teacher professionalism referred to above. The other is metatheory of ethics, more specifically theories that distinguish between different ethical logics and traditions (e.g. Baron etal 1997, Afdal 2014). Here we distinguish between deontological principle-oriented theories; teleological consequentialism, virtue ethics and radical relational ethics. These perspectives help in analyzing what sort of ethics and responsibility that is negotiated and fixated. We use these theories as analytical tools, not as distinct possibilities. This way we are able to identify ethical hybridities, negotiations and processes.

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