Helen Joanna Boon

This collective writing, led by Buchanan and developed in conversation with educators and scholars across disciplines, reflects on what it means to teach and do ethics in education today. In an era shaped by shifting moral landscapes, accelerating technologies, and renewed struggles for justice and recognition, ethics is no longer a background concern, it is central to the practice and possibility of education itself. Rather than positioning ethics as a fixed body of knowledge or a list of rules, the authors frame it as an evolving, lived engagement. They ask how educators might cultivate ethical sensibilities that are responsive to context, open to uncertainty, and committed to relationality. This is not ethics as compliance, but ethics as inquiry, an invitation to dwell with moral complexity, rather than resolve it. The contributors explore diverse entry points: from philosophical traditions to classroom practice, from ethical reasoning to embodied responsiveness. Throughout, the emphasis is on practice, on how ethics is enacted in real educational encounters, marked by power, vulnerability, and the everyday demands of care and responsibility. The collaborative form of writing mirrors the collective nature of ethical life. It offers a space where disagreement, reflection, and mutual learning unfold. In resisting the notion of the solitary ethical agent, the authors model a form of co-ethical inquiry—where teaching becomes a site of moral imagination, and where philosophy contributes to a shared effort to live well with others. In this “new key”, ethics is not an add-on to pedagogy, but its very foundation. The work does not prescribe how to be ethical in the 21st century, it asks what it means to keep asking, together. It invites educators to remain attentive, thoughtful, and radically open in their ethical engagements, now more than ever.

Anthropogenic climate change is impacting human survival through its impact upon water quality and availability. An urgent ethical imperative is thus raised for education policy makers and schools, particularly in the Australian and Asia Pacific regions, to adopt a curriculum to help students mitigate and adapt to the dire consequences caused by a warming planet. Through a blue transdisciplinary school curriculum, students will better understand and respond to the broader aspects of what is referred to as the hydrosocial cycle. A school move towards a blue curriculum requires educational policy to mandate an emphasis on the climate change effects upon the water cycle. An effective shift to a blue curriculum also requires that teachers’ ethical perspectives and sensitivities are sharpened through their tertiary education courses. This is needed so they develop confidence and pedagogy for teaching anthropogenic climate change generally, something still missing from Australian and other classrooms around the world, and, more specifically, for teaching the hydrosocial cycle. The Four Component Model of Ethical Decision Making is offered as a useful framework to guide teachers in examining their values and motivations when teaching potentially confronting topics such as the impacts of climate change upon the hydrosocial cycle.

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education’s applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon’s observation that ‘Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there’s much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are’ (in Peters et al., 2020 Peters, M. A. , Arndt, S. , Tesar, M. , Jackson, L. , Hung, R. , Mika, C. , Ozolins, J. T. , Teschers, C. , Orchard, J. , Buchanan, R. , Madjar, A. , Novak, R. , Besley, T. , Sturm, S. , Roberts, P. , & Gibbons, A (2020). Philosophy of education in a new key. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1759194 [Google Scholar] , p. 17). However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts.

Schools in Western countries are places where work-related conditions lead to teacher disaffection and attrition. To mitigate this employers and scholars advocate fostering teacher resilience. This chapter presents a critical examination of teacher resilience. Originally conceived as a personal trait, later research showed human resilience is an attribute that can be developed. Resilience is one’s ability to manage stressors and maintain adaptive functioning across all domains of life. Latterly, scholars investigated resilience in teachers, mainly through qualitative or quantitative self-report studies. This research constitutes perceived teacher resilience, because as formulated, teacher resilience is conceptually flawed, limited in scope, based on teachers’ functioning within their professional lives. We do not know what constitutes long-serving teachers’ actual, lived-in resilience: what enables teachers to maintain their wellbeing and effectiveness in the classroom, reflecting human resilience as originally conceived. For an accurate profile of teacher resilience we must study those still teaching, and teachers who have exited the profession to determine why they left. Perhaps exiting the profession signals a resilient person who does not accept working conditions that do not support wellbeing or teaching effectiveness. Perhaps ‘teacher resilience’ is inaccurately used in the context of teacher attrition and disaffection.

This article documents the adaptation, piloting and validation of a measure of teachers’ ethical sensitivity. To create the test, we modified a measure from dentistry drawing on literature in teacher professional ethics and drew on the expertise of professional ethics scholars and practitioners. Based on the results of Rasch analysis combined with traditional approaches to psychometric validation, the instrument was found to be a valid and reliable means of discerning levels of ethical sensitivity within the group of participants. However, participants’ lack of ethical sensitivity as revealed by overall low scores, we contend, lends credence to concerns that teacher education programs may not be adequately preparing future teachers to meet expectations in connection with the ethical dimensions of the profession. In conclusion, we call for further research on pre- and in-service teachers’ capacity to perceive, reason about and react appropriately to ethical situations encountered at work.