Educators, Moral Dilemmas, and Classroom Practice: Navigating the Gray Areas

Ethical decision-making is embedded in individuals' everyday thinking and behavior, affecting both inter- and intrapersonal relationships with significant others. While the individual’s ways of being may be modified when making decisions in any given environment, these decisions do not appear to be dichotomous, but rather an evolution based on a burgeoning understanding of circumstances, situatedness, and personal experience. This Research Topic explores educators’ beliefs and lived experiences with ethical decision-making, examining how they navigate the moral complexity and how this engagement with students shapes their professional identity and sense of self.Grounded in a constructivist situative framework, we begin with the premise that ethical understanding is provisional and socially constructed, continuously re-examined and re-negotiated through dialogue, reflection, and institutional practice. A situative perspective asserts that individuals belong to multiple, overlapping, and socially constructed worlds (Nolen et al., 2015), “draw[ing] the circle wider [than individual cognition] and seek to place thinking agents in their larger social, physical, cultural, and historical contexts” (Russ et al., 2016, p. 403). This lens interprets individual actions, behaviors, and decisions by considering how they relate to, and are shaped by, social, cultural, and historical contexts and systems. In this way, ethical decision-making is not necessarily a fixed process, but one that develops through ongoing interactions, reflection, and experience. Nel Noddings’ and Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care perspectives shift educators’ ethical decisions from abstract, rule-based approaches toward more relational, care-focused, and context-driven responses that emphasize student empathy, emotional well-being, and students' needs in our classrooms (Dacey, 2019). Using a classroom community of philosophical inquiry as a pedagogical tool, we welcome manuscripts that discuss moral dilemmas and mainstream issues with students in our classrooms. In addition, we seek submissions that address how teachers grapple with and attempt to resolve the heavy emotional burdens they absorb, sometimes clashing with institutional pressures, and how they reconcile and cope with measuring success that balances standard metrics with more holistic health and wellness practices and measures.This collection aims to draw greater attention to the ethical dimensions of everyday teaching and how educators make sense of morally complex situations in their classrooms, including approaches that move away from the more traditional, rule-based frameworks to moral education practices such as open inquiry and dialog, modeling patience, consistency, two-way communication, and collaborative problem-solving. The focus of this issue is on whether the ethical decision-making of educators stems from their formal ethics training in education classes, from situated experiences in educational settings, through observation of students' reactions, through assisting students in making decisions, or simply from personal life experiences, values, and backgrounds. We welcome articles that identify significant differences in the types of ethical decisions we make as educators based on our positionality, experiences, and the contexts in which we teach; articles that explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:● Everyday Ethical Dilemmas in the Classroom (including AI)● Positionality and Ethical Decision-Making ● Students’ Perspectives and Ethical Learning ● Care-Based Ethical Approaches● Ethics Training and Situated Experience● Institutional and Classroom Contexts Together, these contributions will examine ethical decision-making as an ongoing process shaped by educators’ experiences, relationships with students, positionality, and the contexts in which teaching and learning occur. Topic editors: Charity M. Dacey, Lavina Sequeira Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/87078/educators-moral-dilemmas-and-classroom-practice-navigating-the-gray-areas