Theoretically, there is no question about the necessarily high level of morals with regard to the helping professionals, including teachers. Pragmatically however, no data or model exists that could be relied on while preparing students to such professions.

During the last two decades, there has been no comprehensive examination on the morality, ethics and awareness of teacher education students that will soon become the teachers of our children. The last research project that focused on a special part of morality, academic misbehavior, was conducted in the early 90s in the US. Since then, we have not been able to access and identify investigations on the same issue while scandals of plagiarism, academic misconduct, and similar challenges in higher education have evolved into a hot potato issue worldwide. Academic ethics among business students (and sometimes medical students) seems to be a rather important research question but it is underrepresented in relation to the helping professions, especially future teachers.

In the presentation, we outline the concept of moral awareness related to academic matters but instead of focusing on academic misconduct, we aim to apply the positive, constructive approach of academic integrity. We wish to present how we can conceptualize the acceptance of morally questionable academic acts as symptoms of improper/undeveloped learning strategies, which, within the framework of academic integrity, is considered as a (higher education) pedagogical problem that can be solved. This way, we argue that academic integrity can be transformed into the goal of higher education, which is especially important for future teachers to understand, adhere to and transfer to later generations.

In the presentation, we focus on a cross-border region of Hungary, Romania and Ukraine, where majority Hungarians, minority Hungarians and native Romanian and Ukrainian students were surveyed. As a continuation of our previous examinations, we are interested whether teacher education students in the particular region of these three countries differ from each other with respect to academic ethics, whether they are characterized by a higher level of moral standards and awareness, as society and the profession itself expect them to be. This question is extremely important if we consider the social, economic and historical background of these countries, namely, the high level of mistrust and perception of corruption, the lack of social cohesion, the politically, socially and economically disadvantaged and peripheral status and all the consequences of these factors. Such a background may pose serious challenges against moral education independent of whether we consider teacher education students or the children that these students may teach in the future in the relevant region, where opportunities and alternatives to develop social cohesion are heavily demanded. 

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