Teachers as Situated Ethicists

Educational ethics are not experienced in a vacuum or enacted by means of standardised checklists; instead, teachers must often make complex ethical decisions in situ, and in doing so they must strive to reconcile sometimes competing interests. This chapter elaborates how the participating teachers engaged in situated ethics by conducting deeply contextualised decision-making about ethical dilemmas as they encountered them in their respective sites of teaching practice. The chapter also analyses the link between the teachers&s; ethical decision-making and their morally guided sense-making of situations often not of their making but for which they were held to be ultimately accountable.