In an age of global uncertainty with alternating agendas and request for technological solutions for the problems of the future, new and sometimes blurred ethical issues and problems emerge. No clear and fixed answers concerning future ethical issues seems available. One important aim of education must therefore be to provide students with tools that can help them navigate in a murky and confused ethical landscape. Students must attain the capacity to be aware of and pay attention to new and unexpected as well as old and well-known ethical issues and problems (Arendt 1998).

In this paper, we thus argue that ethical attention is, or at least should be, an essential part of ethical formation. By ethical attention, we mean an explicit awareness of ethical issues in the form of intersubjective problems and conflicts concerning rights, duties, relationships and trust. In the literature ‘ethical attention’ often refers to a perceptive-epistemological dimension of ethics (Bowden 1998). In this paper however, the concept refers to a specific educational end; that students should become attentive to ethical issues and problems as they appear both within a school setting and in the global world.

In the school setting teachers have the opportunity to encourage their students to pay attention to various ethical issues by inviting them to participate in discussions on principles of human conduct related to school subjects, the students’ daily life in the school, and actual as well and envisioned future situations in the world. Students in primary and secondary school should of course not be expected to be fully aware of, or possess ready-made solutions to, all of the world’s ethical dilemmas and problems. However, the educational system should be structured so that it supports the progressive development and attainment of the capacity to identify and discuss such issues in a qualified and reflective manner. This, we believe, is an important part of what it means to be ethically competent.

The German educational thinker Dietrich Benner has suggested the following tripartite model for (levels of) ethical competence:

1. Ethical-moral
  basic knowledge

2. Ethical and moral  
  judgment competence

3. Ethical and moral   competence
  to draft a suggestion of action

Benner, D., & Nikolova, R. (2016) p. 32.

This model, in particular the competences outlined at levels 2 and 3, seems well-suited for a world in which uncertainty seems to characterize ethical concepts and issues at every level. However, the model also suffers from a predominantly cognitive focus, which seems to exclude, or at least sideline, the personal, embodied and existential dimensions of ethical formation.

In this paper we thus build on but also seek to develop and extend Benner’s model. Based on an empirical pilot study of the development of ethical agency in three Danish Public Schools we discuss how teachers may promote student’s capacity for ethical attention by given them opportunities to discuss and make judgements about ethical issues and draft suggestions for possible actions based on these judgements. One important point we will like to draw attention to is the students’ engaged and embodied approach to ethical issues in and through school subjects such as history, biology, social science and native language education. Our primary aim is to explore whether and how such embodied engagements, which at their best seems to combine (moral) imagination (Fesmire 2003) and rational discourse, can be used to support the development of ethical attention on a level suitable for children and young children. The paper thus discusses whether didactical approaches, which involve experimental and aesthetic elements, might support the students’ ethical attention by offering them the possibility to discover and invent ‘new’ ethical vocabularies and concepts.

In a recent empirical pilot study (Authors, 2018), the authors investigated the development of moral agency among pupils in three Danish public schools located in the suburbs of a medium-sized provincial city using classroom observations, and interviews with teachers, pupils, pedagogues and parents. The classroom observations took place during specific classes in the second, fifth and eighth grade. The interviews with the children were conducted in smaller groups (typically three or four children at a time). See details in Table 1 below. The specific aim of the study was to investigate whether and how (discussions of) ethically relevant concepts, norms and questions are part of the teaching and everyday life of the school. In the interviews with the pupils we were both interested in gauging their explicit knowledge of ethics, in particular whether they knew the words “moral”, “morality” and “ethics”, and in whether they were aware of and capable of identifying ethical issues and could talk about such issues at a general level. We also probed the children’s ability to draft suggestions for actions, but only partially and indirectly, since a full investigation of this particular ethical competence would require other methodological approaches, for instance role-play, which was not included in the pilot project. In our classroom observations our focus was on whether, how and to what extent teachers drew upon and made use of ethically salient issues in their teaching. Analysis and interpretation of the collected data was guided by a grounded theory approach (Strauss & Corbin 1998). Table 1 Observations – number of lessons, grades and subjects School 1 24 lessons (Subjects: Danish, history, social science, nature/techniques, Christianity, mathematics, music, project-assignment) Grades: 2, 5 and 8 School 2 19 lessons (Subjects: Danish, Christianity, nature/techniques Grades: 2x 5 School 3 34 lessons (Subjects: Danish, Christianity, social science, nature/technique, biology, Afterschool daycare) Grade: 2, 5 and 8. Interviews Children Grade 2: 4 group-interviews/ Grade 5: 15 group-interviews Grade 8: 9 group-interviews (a total of 112 children from 3 schools) Teachers 11/ 3 schools Pedagogues 2/ 1 school + 4 extra interviews at another school Parents 3/ 1 school

One of our major findings was that teachers and students typically approach and deal with ethical issues indirectly. Most of the pupils we interviewed did not know the words ‘ethics’ or ‘morality’, although they recognized ethical problems and issues when they were described to them. Pupils also often seemed quite unaware of ethical issues presented to them by their teachers. Teachers on the other hand typically believed that part of their job is to contribute to the ethical formation of their pupils, but also believed that pupils do not need to be explicitly told, when they are presented with ethically salient questions and topics. One reason for this might be that most teachers view ethical formation as an intrinsic and inherent part of the school’s formative influence on the pupils, and that there is thus no need for them to explicitly address and discuss ethical concepts, issues and arguments. This view seems to be supported by the teacher-interviews we conducted as part of the study. The ethical attention of both teachers and students thus appear quite weak in the sense that ethics is not a distinct and explicit topic on the curriculum. This presents a challenge for our understanding of ethical attention and of how the educational system can and should support the development of ethical competence. On the one hand, we want children to be(come) aware of the ethical challenges of the world, i.e. have strong ethical attention. On the other hand we also want children to understand ethics not as a distinct and separate human practice, but as something that is always-already an integral part of everyday life. This raises the question of how to properly cultivate the ethical attention of the students.The question is what the right level of ethical attention should be?

Arendt, H. 1998[1958] The Human Condition. Chicago/London: The University of Chiccago Press Authors (2018) Link to report Benner, D., & Nikolova, R. (2016). Ethisch-moralische Kompetenz als Teil öffentlicher Bildung, München: Ferdinand Schöningh. Bowden, P. (1998). “Ethical attention”. European Journal of Philosophy, 6 (1) pp.59-77. Fesmire, S. (2003). John Dewey and Moral Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Strauss, A. and Corbin, J. 1998). Basics of Qualitative Resesarch. Thousand Oaks, London, new Delhi: Sage Publications