Values as part of pupils’ ethical competence

• The background of the paper is an on-going research project called ‘What May be Learnt in Ethics? – Varieties of Conceptions of Ethical Competence to be Taught in Compulsory School’ funded by the Swedish Research Council (2015-2017). In Sweden, questions about the teaching of ethics in compulsory school have regained attention since National Tests in RE began in 2013. Every fourth child in grade six and nine is evaluated each year with regard to having/not having approved knowledge of ethics, as ethics forms part of RE, and one can ask whether it is reasonable to be forced to undertake a test assessing your skills in ethics and risk being evaluated as not passing. This raises the question of what constitutes relevant knowledge in this field, a question which to a large extent has been absent in research. The purpose of the project is to identify and elucidate varieties of conceptions of ethical competence and critically analyse and discuss them, in relation to each other and in relation to ethical theory, as potential educational content in compulsory school. The ethical competences in focus relate to different curriculum levels, i.e. the institutional, the instructional and the experiential level. In this keynote lecture, I will focus on the experiential level, pupils’ utterances in ethical tasks in the National Test of 2013 and the kind of ethical competence that is shown there, but also pupils’ expressed needs for ethical competence in interviews. The relation between analytical and normative aspects in ethical competence – i.e. values as part of ethical competence – will be discussed in relation to their common grounding in broader existential understandings.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap -- Didaktik (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences -- Didactics (hsv//eng)

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