Week 3 – The impact of personal and cultural

values in educational contexts

TOPIC GOALS

 Explore personal and cultural values in education for educators and

students

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1. Introduction
“Great people have great values and great ethics.”
(Jeffrey Gitomer, 1993)

2. Educators Personal and Cultural Values

Our values as educators play a significant role to how we portray ourselves

in action, what we do and what we say. Most of the times you find educators
asking themselves the same question. What kind of an educator am I? Educators
always need to justify themselves through their teaching practices and that can
only be done when we reflect on what we do and why we teach in a particular
way. That involves the values of any educator to be questioned.
‘Throughout our teaching careers we think and behave in certain ways and
believe in certain things, such as how far our teaching can be called ‘educational’,
about what we can offer children and what our capabilities are. What we do, think,
and feel about teaching constitute our sense of professional identity. We can
reveal and communicate this identity when we address and articulate an answer
to the question’ (Ghaye, 2011).

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 If we reflect on these descriptions of practice, we give
ourselves the chance to learn from our experiences of
teaching. This can help to move our practice forward.
(Ghaye, 2011)

‘While a case could be made that there are some universally accepted
values, values in education are culturally bound. No aspect of curriculum is taught
in a cultural void, and the relationship of values education to cultural context
throws up particular challenges in attempting an international study’ (Stephenson,
1998).
Educators usually do not stay in an unchanged set of values as they develop
more practice and experience the reflection on these shifts and changes happen
depending on the setting and context they work in. To be called a professional
implies that educators need to reflect on their teaching constantly and be
responsive to what is happening around them. ‘A teacher’s values should be
derived from the nature of what constitutes effective and ethical practice. To
reach this position, we have to understand and question the purposes of education’
(Ghaye, 2011)

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 Cultural values on the other hand are the particular concepts of interest of
each individual when asked about their beliefs, personality, values and identity.
That way you can distinguish their cultural views and behaviours in their personal
lives which then reflect in their practices as well. This also reflects specific
characteristics and certain practices on a larger nationwide scale that constitutes
each educational context. However, ‘Individuals are expected to cultivate and
express their own preferences, feelings, ideas, and abilities. Schwartz (1994)
distinguishes two types of autonomy: intellectual autonomy encourages
individuals to pursue their own ideas and intellectual directions independently,
and affective autonomy entails a pursuit of affectively positive experience by
individuals for themselves. In cultures with an emphasis on embeddedness,
people are viewed as entities embedded in the larger group. Meaning in life is
provided largely through social relationships, group identification, participation
in the group’s shared way of life, and striving toward shared goals of the group’
(Fischer, 2006).

As Higgins (2011) argues, that ethical reflection is ‘Such reflection will

often touch on moral considerations—impartial deliberations about duty, right
action, and the needs of others—but it begins and ends with first-personal
questioning, in thick evaluative terms, about the shape of one’s life as a whole.
Ethics is rooted in the perpetual practical question ‘What should I do next?’ and
flowers, in our more contemplative moments, into questions like ‘what do I want
to become?’, ‘what does it mean to be fully human?’, and ‘what would make my
life meaningful, excellent, or rich?’

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 Professional ethics, then, should be distinguished from what I call ‘moral
professionalism’, which deals with codes of professional conduct and our role-
specific obligations to others. In contrast, the ethics of teaching, as I propose it
here, will probe the relation between the teaching life and the good life,
connecting the question ‘why teach?’ with the question ‘how should I live?’ It
considers what draws us to the practice of teaching and what sustains us there in
the face of difficulty’.
‘At meso-level, disciplinary differences and academic cultures are highly
influential in academic practices (Fanghanel 2009; Becher 2001; Trowler et
al. 2012). Epistemological differences are evident in varying academic cultures.
They result in divergent disciplinary teaching and learning norms and practices,
where different conceptions of teaching and learning become apparent
(Becher 2001; Neumann et al. 2010; Lee 2007) (…) At macro-level, teachers
operate within structural conditions that can include institutional policies,
regulations, the requirements of external evaluation bodies and the external
political environment (Henkel 2000; Deem and Lucas 2007). These structures
determine the physical and organisational context and can constrain or enable the
choices and opportunities available to individuals and communities within the
organisation (Mathieson 2011; Kaatrakoski et al. 2016)’ (Englund, Olofsson and
Price, 2018).

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 Disciplinary Differences

Institutional Policies
Meso-Level Academic Cultures

Macro-Level
Regulations
External Evaluation Bodies

External Political Environment

I wish to raise the question, ‘In what ways can reflective practices enhance human
flourishing?’ Underpinning this question is my assumption that enhancing human
flourishing is important work. So in what ways is it important? How does it
matter? And what do we actually mean by the term human flourishing? In a very
pragmatic sense would reflective practices that enhance human flourishing help
us bounce-back from adverse events in our lives? Would they help us be more
open-minded, have more creative thoughts, enjoy better relationships with
others? Be more resilient?
These, I suggest, are big questions that deserve some serious attention from those
who regard themselves as reflective practitioners, who learn through reflection
and who use various reflective practices for some positive purposes. For those
who believe in practical action for positive purposes, I frame a challenge as a
positive question namely, ‘What would we need to do to (re)cast reflective
practices in the role of enhancing human flourishing?’ I wonder what kind of
uncommon wisdom we would discover if we embraced a question of this kind?
(Ghaye, 2010)

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Critical Theory / Critical Social Theory
 Based on the principles of empowerment and the theories of Paulo Freire
(1970, 1972)
 Transformative learning (Mezirow, 1978, 1981, 1990 and 1997)

Transformational Learning (Mezirow, 1978, 1981, 1990, 1997, 2000)

 ‘A process in which adults change their views and habits – which they have
gained as a result of their experience – according to the current situations
and changes they have encountered’ (Kabakci, Odabasi and Kilicer,
2010:263).

 It involves personal awareness and understanding, through true

emancipation from sometimes unquestioning acceptance of life
experience, to active engagement or questioning of how we know what we
know. (Mezirow, 1997)

As Moon (2008) notes, one person cannot make another person reflect,
they can only facilitate or foster a critically reflective approach through
appropriate conditions in relation to the habits already formed by teachers.
Only then, perhaps, can the internalisation and application of the attitudes
(Dewey, 1933), the lenses (Brookfield, 1995) and the competencies (Pollard et
al., 2008) at the heart of critical reflection transform learning in the way that
Mezirow (1997) refers to.

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  Leitch (2006, p. 551) acknowledges that “many emotional, sensory and
embodied dimensions of experience lie below the threshold of
consciousnesses” and are difficult to tap into or to access.
 “embodied knowledge” (p. 552)

Personal Reflection
 New Learning?
 Challenged your thinking about own ‘position’ and philosophy as an
educator?

3. Student’s Personal and Cultural Values

PUPILS’ MORAL AND CULTURAL EXPERIENCE (Halstead and Taylor, 1996, pp.119)

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 Educators have the responsibility through their sayings and actions to
transfer the values and morals of any educational system to their students through
teaching them the qualities needed to survive the outside world. They need to
possess a set of socially acceptable values and principles to blend in society to be
considered as morally educated people. This should be formed in students by the
educator’s own values through their ability to become competent moral agents.

Any belief, perception or attitude needs to be addressed and cultivated

through the unwritten rules and regulations of any school setting. Family values
and culture play a significant role in the social behaviour of the students and a
more important role in the development of morally appropriate societies. Social
and cultural values in class can shape the personalities of student’s behaviour.

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4. John Dewey’s Theory on Personal and Cultural Values
For John Dewey the sense of values was especially important as most of
his writings and theories involved around reflection in regard to setting one’s
beliefs and morals. Kompf & Denicolo, (2005) argue in their book Connecting
Policy and Practice: Challenges for Teaching and Learning in Schools and
Universities that ‘One reason why Dewey’s classic contribution to democratic
education is still relevant today, is because of his analysis of the interdependence
between human competence, social organisation, moral agency, education and
democracy understood as a way of life. For Dewey, democracy was education in
a broad sense, and for him schools played an essential role in developing morality
and democracy’ (pp. 222)
‘Dewey denied insurmountable barriers between the descriptive sciences
and the normative sciences, what is and what ought to be, and between rationality
and emotions. In viewing the world from a transactional standpoint, Dewey
rejected all philosophical traditions which held the fundamental world order as
fixed and stable. For Dewey, all talk about eternal truth or absolutistic and
universal theoretical claims was misguiding. In a world constantly changing, all
theories and practices are context dependent with regard to their justification,
interpretation and application. At the same time, not all things were relative to
context. Dewey trusted that human rationality had universal potential but it was
not yet well developed, and the best example so far of systematic and impartial
rationality was to be found in science. Therefore, Dewey was careful not to
confuse universal procedures with the outcome of such procedures. Outcomes
were more context dependent than the rational procedures producing the
outcomes and the distinction between outcome and rational procedure can be

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recognised in Dewey’s two-level concept of experience (Dewey, 1925a; Hickman
and Alexander, 1998)’ (Kompf & Denicolo, 2005).
‘Values refer to intersubjectively accessible states of affairs, in the real
world, and that opens the possibility for moral knowledge (Dewey, 1925b). The
moral answers cannot be of universal or absolute character, but it is possible to
construct objective values in relation to a specific context, action or society
(Dewey, 1932)’ (Kompf et al., 2005)
For Dewey, occupation or vocation is simply ‘a concrete term for
continuity’ or in another formulation, ‘a continuous activity having a purpose’
(Dewey, 1916, p. 307)’ (Higgins, 2011).

5. Conclusion
Values are central to both the theory of education and the practical
activities of schools in two ways. First, schools and individual teachers within
schools are a major influence, alongside the family, the media and the peer group,
on the developing values of children and young people, and thus of society at
large. Secondly, schools reflect and embody the values of society; indeed, they
owe their existence to the fact that society values education and seeks to exert
influence on the pattern of its own future development through education.
(Halstead and Taylor, 1996)

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Further reading from the Weekly EBooks:

Book: Higgins, C (2011), The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional

Practice, Chapter: 4 A Question of Experience: Dewey and Gadamer on
Practical Wisdom, pages 111 - 134

Additional Material:
Video: Wellbeing for Children: Identity and Values

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Englund, C., Olofsson, A.D. and Price, L. (2018). The influence of sociocultural and structural
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