Conference Agenda

Social background still plays a major role for “educational success”, this is particular true for countries like Germany and Austria. Critical knowledge about and the reflection of social inequality is therefore a central challenge for teacher education and is increasingly demanded by students and experts as part of critical professionalization (Mecheril et al., Messerschmidt 2013, Czejkowska 2018). In the presentation I draw on results from the project “Habitus.Power.Education – Transformation through Reflection” that was conducted at the Department of Educational Research and Teacher Training of the University Graz from 2019 to 2021. Together with students in teacher training the project team researched experiences of privilege and discrimination in educational settings. One of the main objectives of the project was to develop Open Educational Resources for higher education, in particular teacher training, that support processes of critical professionalization. A central concept in the project is habitus reflexivity. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social inequality habitus reflexivity is not so much about an individual exploration of one’s habitus, but rather about the question of how one is involved in unequal power relations as an educator as well as the question of how institutions like the school or the university are involved in the reproduction of social inequality.

Often pedagogical perspectives on social inequality are reduced to conceptions of diversity in which all inequalities are treated almost interchangeably. But issues of race, class, gender or disability have specific, though interwoven, histories, operate differently, though in the context of each other, and ask for different pedagogical perspectives and positions (e.g. Prengel 1995). The focus of the presentation is on the rather neglected category of class, understood in its intersectionality with other categories of social inequality. In the project we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of class as economic, cultural, social and symbolic relational concept as well as to his theory of the subtle mechanisms of power in educational settings (Bourdieu 1985, 1993, 1997,2001). We also refer to bell hooks’ intersectional conception of class (hooks 2020) and the concepts of classism by Andreas Kemper and Heike Weinbach (2009). Invisibility seems central in relation to class and classism (e.g., Wellgraf 2014). Experiences of classism are often articulated indirectly through emotions like fear or shame. In particular the myth of meritocracy renders discrimination invisible because it suggests that inequality in a consequence of achievement and thus fair and rational. However, making classism visible is an ambivalent pedagogical endeavor. In the presentation I will discuss some of the challenges when dealing with class and classism in higher education and briefly present the Open Educational Resources (Froebus et al., 2021) developed in the project.

Teacher training for moral education / education in values is a topic discussed in the scope of Philosophy and of Education Sciences, namely in studies on curriculum and didactics, varying its orientation according to the adopted foundations, both of ethical order and referring to psychological research on moral development.

Portuguese curriculum provides since 2017 the Citizenship and Development subject as a space for discussion of issues related to the development of personal, social, and civic competencies According to the National Strategy for Citizenship Education (2017), “Citizenship Education is a mission of the whole school; it is proposed that the implementation of the curricular component of Citizenship and Development follows a framework of Whole-school Approach based.” (p. 6).The change of curriculum requires the need for training to which teachers did not have access.

This communication intends to present the results of a project in the Portuguese context which aimed to explore the questions, difficulties and needs of training by teachers of Citizenship and Development of children aged between 10 and 12 years old. The training contemplates 25 hours, divided into six modules, where the themes of citizenship and moral development have been worked on, and 25 hours of implementation of the activities with their class.

The training project was based on Rest's integrative model of moral development (1979; 1984; 1986). While named neo-kohlberguian (Rest et al, 2000), Rest model of moral development is rather different from Kohlberg approach. Faced with the question "What processes or functions must have occurred in order for an individual to perform a moral act?" (Rest, 1986, p. 3), Rest identified four components of moral development (Rest, 1979; 1986), each of which corresponds to a different psychological process, being moral behavior the result of these different processes and not just the logical or affective consequence of a single process, as follows: moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral motivation and moral action, each of which can be studied separately. By moral sensitivity, it is meant that the person is aware of the moral dimension of the situation and so s/he’s able to interpret the situation in terms of how his/her actions will affect the welfare of others. Moral judgment is the ability to formulate possible moral courses of action and a plan of action that applies a moral standard or ideal in that specific situation. Moral motivation is the capacity to decide for one course of action by evaluating if it serves moral values. Moral action is the ability to accomplish what one has decided to do, by identifying and validly overcoming obstacles and difficulties. (Rest, 1984; 1986) Several studies have been made on moral judgement of college students and professional groups by Rest and his research group, namely using the DIT (Defining Issues Test) (Rest, 1979; 1986). Also based on this model, between 1998 and 2002, the Department of Education of the University of Minnesota (Narvaez et al., 2004) developed the community voices and character education project (CVCE), a moral education project, addressed to children from 10 to 12 years old, in collaboration with middle school teachers.

Our collaborative project also involves researchers and teachers. It does not have in view the training and evaluation of predefined behaviors, but rather the flexible articulation with other components of the school curriculum and the development of transversal ethical competencies of the children (Narvaez et al., 2004).