As teacher educators, what should our response be to the GTCE's new Code of Conduct and Practice?
A revised Code of Conduct and Practice for registered teachers was introduced by the General Teaching Council for England (GTCE 2009) in September 2009. This Code replaced an earlier, and less detailed code (GTC 2004), and sets out the expected standards and norms of practice for more than half a million registered teachers in England.
This symposium will explore the nature, place, purpose and ethics of the GTCE Code of Conduct and Practice, together with models of professionalism constructed by postgraduate teachers in training, and how these models match to those framed by the GTCE through this new professional Code.
The circulation of the draft code in December 2008 (GTCE 2008) created considerable media interest, particularly in relation to the expectation for the moral and ethic behaviour of teachers both inside and outside of the scheduled school day. This raised some alarm in parts of the education community and the ethical considerations will be explored here. In particular it will be argued here that the Code is in danger of imposing an objective morality upon the teaching profession that is at odds with the contemporary cultural and political zeitgeist.
Teachers in training occupy a unique and interesting position in which they are governed by the Code even though many may have very little or no knowledge of it; furthermore they are being expected to take their full place within a profession before, in many cases, they have been allowed sufficient opportunity to develop their professional knowledge, skills and perspectives.
The symposium is composed of four linked papers. The first two papers provide and theoretical analysis of the moral and ethical issues concerned. The first will explore the Code through the historical and ethical philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) and seeks to offer a Virtue Ethics approach to teacher development. The second continues this ethical consideration and uses the work of Levi-Strauss (1960) to construct three distinct
(Click on an abstract title to view it in PDF format.)