• Introduction
• Taking Learning Seriously
• The Scholarship of Teaching
• The Context of Public Discourse on Teaching
• The Language of Teaching
• Student Expectations and Faculty Ideals
• The Character of Knowledge
• Expectation and Assessment
• The Development of a Language of the Scholarship of Teaching
• The Value of Moral Language
• A Common Public Language
• Conclusion
• Notes and References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 2000 by Hugh Sockett (hsockett@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

One pragmatic advantage of regarding the moral as the basic language of teaching is that it already is a common public language across disciplines. That is, people usually can talk about effort, determination, laziness, deceit, concentration, fairness, the whole catalogue of moral and intellectual virtues and vices. Such concepts are not fixed by the Greeks (or whomever) but they are, as MacIntyre (1967) pointed out, in constant flux -- witness the impact of feminism on our moral thought and language. 

Nevertheless, the temptation must be resisted to base this language in a deficit or assessment perspective and to see teaching questions as circling around moral lapses. Beating our breasts, we could ask "How have we failed to have students become sufficiently morally and intellectually autonomous that they can be open about their beliefs? How have we so distorted our disciplines that students see it as a bunch of information? Why do we ignore the student as a citizen with moral and intellectual responsibilities? How have we failed to engender a passion for things intellectual in our students?" Putting questions like this assumes a vocabulary of deficit and neglect and a context of justification. 

That seems to me a mistake. A more sophisticated approach to moral inquiry within the scholarship of teaching is to sharpen the moral language we possess, not in justification, but in description and explanation. Take the principle of fairness. There is immense room in the scholarship of teaching to develop this concept both in subject-matter and in the complexity of student relationships. For example, the time we spend with individuals, the space we give to student questions, the fairness with which we handle students' halting attempts to say something and the teaching integrity with which we handle challenges to our own positions are not matters of "comfort" or "rapport" between teacher and learner, but the place where the moral and the epistemological meet in excellent and scholarly teaching. 

Most interesting to me is the potential contained in the notion of courage (once one has abandoned its association with physical courage set out in Plato's The Laches). For there is more than just an etymological accident between that virtue and the terms encouraging and discouraging. Teachers who see these as moral acts (as opposed to such technical terms as reinforcement and punishment) can struggle with the task of how does one stimulate students to take risks (i.e. be brave) with ideas. How far do one's deliberate or accidental classroom actions sap the student's will, and so discourage them? If we could describe our teaching in a richer moral language, we would be able to understand our work with much more subtlety, finesse, and in a scholarly way. 

Thus when Hutchings and Shulman write of a long haul and a pattern of inquiry, the fundamental concerns seem to me to be how we can develop existing moral concepts to describe and explain our teaching. Along the way, if we have not already done so, we will need to ditch such encumbrances as the supposed separation of fact and value, the separation of theory and practice and other legacies of positivism enshrined in behaviorism.