Study On The Reconstruction Of Teachers' Professional Ethics

Teachers' professional ethics refers to a set of norms that teachers need to abide by to maintain the reputation of the group within their professional realm. The significance of these norms is not restricted to the prescription of regulations. It goes further into the reality of teachers' professional practice. By these norms, we are not only concerned with the individual moral responsibility of teachers, but also try to demonstrate the ethic responsibility and its realization of teachers as a professional group. Teachers' professional ethics has raised the bar for teachers, not merely in terms of moral standard, but the ethic quality of teachers as professionals - ethic rationality. It is the integration of ethic knowledge, ethic consciousness and ethic thinking that lies in the center of teachers' teaching and other professional activities. Teachers' professional ethics emphasizes the divine and humanistic ethic order and ethic sprit engendered in the career of teachers as a professional group. Based on a careful examination of the current project of teachers' professional ethic building-up in China, this paper attempts to answer a core question: how to reconstruct teachers' professional ethics, given the existing situation?Chapter 1 of the thesis first examines the rich content of teachers' professional ethics by distinguishing the concept from that of professional moral, teachers' law and civil moral respectively. By doing so, the author intends to promote a common understanding of teachers' professional ethics and clarify the substance and goal of the construction of teachers' professional ethics. This chapter provides the conceptual and theoretical foundation of the whole research.Then what is the current situation of teachers' professional ethics in schools (including elementary, secondary and high schools) of China? How is professional ethics related to teachers' moral behaviors? What justifies the discourse of professional ethics? The second chapter of the thesis aims to provide answers to these questions by empirical evidence. Relying mainly on in-depth interviews of school teachers, the author seeks to find out their understandings of teachers' professional ethics and the most pressing practical problems from the forefront of teaching. In this way, the author incorporates the teachers' perspective towards the construction of professional ethics. Besides the interviews, participant observation is another key method employed in the research. Sitting in classrooms and observing interactions between the teacher and the students, the author has managed to acquaint herself with the practice of teachers' professional ethics in the practice of teaching.After establishing a concrete understanding of current professional ethics in schools, Chapter 3 analyses the data collected in Chapter 2 and summarizes the problems of the current efforts to construct teachers' professional ethics. The author then tries to quest underlying reasons of these problems, which may offer some reference to the reconstruction of teachers' professional ethics.Building on the analysis in Chapter 3, the fourth chapter aims at providing some coping strategies for re-constructing teachers' professional ethics. The internal logic of these strategies is: Above all, the author proposes to re-conceptualize teachers' professional ethics, which involves re-orienting the concept from ideal to reality. Grounded on that, efforts must then be made to regularize teachers' professional ethics. This is a process goes from informal to formal, and from practical experience to theory. Further, a return from theory to practice is required. By this, the author means to establish proper interpretations of ethic regulations and find out an effective solution to the training of teachers' professional ethics. And finally, the re-construction of the teachers' professional ethics cannot succeed without resorting to ethic culture. As a result, there shall be a shift from individual responsibility to school responsibility of the construction of teachers' professional ethics and a professional-ethics-oriented school culture will be crucial in the process.Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the research, where the author also discusses the potential directions for further research.