In Professionals’ Ethos and Education for Responsibility, Alfred Weinberger, Horst Biedermann, Jean-Luc Patry and Sieglinde Weyringer offer insights into different concepts and applications of professionals’ ethos focusing on teachers’ ethos. Ethos refers to the responsibility of a professional, and it is considered a key element of a professional’s work. The first time mentioned in ancient Greece denoting character and habit, the word ethos nowadays has several definitions and meanings. This book intends to explore the variety of meanings, with authors in this volume drawing from established concepts of ethos and empirical research to push the field forward.

This volume is the first handbook that brings together cutting-edge international research on teacher ethos from a broad array of disciplines. The main focus will be on research that illustrates current conceptualizations of ethos and its importance for acting effectively and responsibly in and out of the classroom. Research will encompass updated empirical and philosophical work that points to the difference in learning when teaching is practised as a moral activity instead of a merely functional one. Authors are among the world’s foremost researchers whose work crosses over from moral education into psychology, neuroscience, sociology, philosophy, pedagogy, and curriculum, drawing on these various fields of research. Today, more than ever, we understand that teachers, like other professionals, need more than subject-matter expertise for acting responsibly and doing their best in their daily duties. Doing so requires possessing a guiding system of professional ethics, moral positioning, goals, norms, and values – in other words: a professional ethos. While the handbook concentrates on Western domains in the current era, the work will extend to other cultures and times as well. With this comprehensive range of perspectives, the book will be attractive and useful for researchers on teachers and teaching as well as for teacher educators, curriculum designers, educational officials, and, last-but-not-least, anyone who is interested in what makes a good teacher. This volume is also a tribute to Fritz Oser, a leading scholar in research on ethos, who sadly passed-away during the compilation of this handbook.

The VaKE Handbook: Theory and Practice of Values and Knowledge Education presents a theoretical model and many examples in various fields of education and training for the realization of the principle "Values without knowledge are blind, while knowledge without values is irresponsible".

At the center of this book is the complex and perplexing question of how to design professional preparation programs, organizational management practices, public policy systems and robust professional associations committed to and capable of, maintaining confidence, trust and the other hallmarks of responsible professionalism. To do this, we need to rebuild our understanding of professional responsibility from the ground up. We describe how individuals might be prepared to engage in responsible professional service delivery, examine promising options for the reform of professional service systems and finally, outline a reform strategy for improving practice in education and medicine – two essential public services. The nexus of the reform problem in professionalism is establishing a more robust and effective working relationship between teachers and their students; between health care professionals and their patients and between educators and health professionals. Professionalism means acceptance of professional responsibility for student and patient outcomes — not just acceptance of responsibility for technical expertise, but commitment to the social norms of the profession, including trustworthiness and responsibility for client wellbeing. In the past, it may have been sufficient to assume that adequate knowledge can be shaped into standards of professional practice. Today, it is clear that we must take careful account of the ways in which practicing professionals develop, internalize and sustain professionalism during their training, along with the ways in which this commitment to professionalism may be undermined by the regulatory, fiscal, technological, political and emotional incentive systems that impinge on professional workplaces and professional employment systems.

In recent decades the life circumstances of most people around the world have changed enormously. We are again expecting scarcity and economic crisis, the danger of war, terrorism and environmental destruction. However, people’s tendencies toward selfishness and the misuse of freedom, uprooting, dissoluteness and crime are also increasingly being seen as threats to society and individual citizens. The decline of support-giving religious, worldview and moral traditions has given rise to great uncertainty about values. Citizens increasingly experience this as a burden, and are becoming more receptive to a reassessment. More of us are seeking a new orientation. Those responsible for children or youth require this with special urgency, because uncertainty in value orientations also creates uncertainty in education. Are there ways to escape this dilemma? How can we achieve new clarity on the worldview and moral foundations of education? To what ends should we direct education? With what difficulties should we reckon? What tasks must parents fulfil and which should be assigned to teachers? These are the topics dealt with in this book. It provides answers to the questions of parents, teachers and other educators, as well as to those of politicians, economic leaders and spiritual counsellors. It will serve to stimulate thought and contribute to achieving agreement on the central educational tasks of our time.

This book assembles essays by thinkers who were at the center of the German post World War II development of ethical thought in medicine. It records their strategies for overcoming initial resistance among physicians and philosophers and (in the East) politicians. This work traces their different approaches, such as socialist versus liberal bioethics; illustrates their attempt to introduce a culture of dialogue in medicine; and examines their moral ambiguities inherent to the institutionalization of bioethics and in law. Furthermore, the essays in this work pay special attention to the problem of ethics expertise in the context of a pluralism, which the intellectual mainstream of the country seeks to reduce to “varieties of post-traditionalism". Finally, this book addresses the problem of “patient autonomy”,and highlights the difficulty of harmonizing commitment to professional integrity with the project of enhancing physician’s responsiveness to suffering patients. As these essays illustrate, the development of bioethics in Germany does not follow a linear line of progressiveness, but rather retains a sense of the traditional ethos of the guild. An ethos, however, that is challenged by moral pluralism in such a way that, even today, still requires adequate solutions. A must read for all academics interested in the origins and the development of bioethics.

By reconsidering the nature of professional work, renowned scholar Douglas E. Mitchell argues for reconceptualizing educational practices and institutional structures in ways that facilitate and protect educator professional responsibility. This book explores ways educators and their political supporters can seize the social and political power necessary to accept professional responsibility for the design of their work environment. Chapters explore how unionization, ethics, public values, political power, school reform, and trust play an important role in the essence of professional responsibility in schools, arguing that we must use organization, management, and accountability mechanisms to encourage responsible civic participation and professional action in support of public education. This new text for graduate studies in teacher and leadership training frames a much needed analysis of where and how professional responsibility for public education is best incorporated into the work roles of teachers, administrators, and university scholars.

Clinical settings are dynamic educational spaces that present both opportunities and barriers to learning and teaching. Designed to inform, challenge and educate health professionals about the evidence underpinning clinical education practices and outcomes, this multi-disciplinary book brings together important concepts in healthcare education and addresses context and processes of learning, professional identity and socialisation, feedback and assessment, ethics, and inter-professional education. The authors encourage teaching and learning practices based on research findings, expertise and innovation, and the development of individual teaching methods and styles from a theoretical base that provides relevant principles, direction and support. With clear links between theory, research and practice, collaboration from a broad range of clinical disciplines, and models for learning and teaching grounded in empirical research, Clinical Education in the Health Professions will become a standard reference for all health professionals and educators. - examines patterns of practice in clinical education in the health professions, using a qualitative research focus - identifies the roles of university and clinical educators, students, peers and patients in clinical education - highlights implicit tensions in clinical education practice and presents strategies to identify and address such tensions - challenges the reader to consider new approaches to clinical education that may optimise students' learning and enculturation into the health professions

It is nearly impossible to overestimate the significance of a professional ethos in pedagogical situations. Most theories of education understand ethos and ethical acting as belonging to the core of the pedagogical profession. Despite this evidence, remarkably few empirical studies exist on ethos. This book has three main aims: 1) to conceptualize the pedagogical ethos at the theoretical level, 2) to operationalize it systematically, and 3) to study it empirically from the trainers’ perspective but also from that of apprentices. Part 1 offers a critical discussion on different theoretical approaches of professional morality. These include theories on moral values or professional codes, virtue ethics, professional sensitivity, moral commitment, and caring. Identified communalities are combined to form a new model of professional ethos. More intensively than other existing theories, the ethos approach presented in this book stresses the content’s situational impact on decision-making and motivation. The main question guiding the instrument development, dealt with in Part 2, asks how we can distinguish professional morality from the general notion that people should be good. In order to answer this question, vocational education but also a trainer’s pedagogical duties and responsibilities are discussed. Part 3 then presents the result of two empirical studies with vocational trainers and apprentices. It offers some interesting findings for further reflection – input not only relevant for researchers but also educational institutes, professional associations, and practitioners themselves. In short: this book contributes significantly to research on professional morality as well as vocational education.

What does professional responsibility entail in an increasingly insecure, unpredictable and de-regulated world? This is the core question addressed in this text. The point of departure for the various contributions is that professional responsibility is a way of being in the world that includes a particular mandate – to behave in a manner consistent with moral and societal obligations as a professional. Increasingly, however, there is a lack of consensus as to what such mandates imply, and even more dissensus as to what appropriate exercise of responsibility entails. One of the distinctive features of this book is the manner in which it combines normative and empirical dimensions. It moves beyond dualistic perspectives to create a more inclusive conversation on professional responsibility. In the face of increasing complexity of professional work, professional responsibility remains open to further development. The book signals direction for the development of professional responsibility, and while seeking to give direction to ongoing deliberations avoids the pitfalls of performativity. The chapters are grounded in a variety of disciplinary perspectives and traverse various professional boundaries in a self-reflexive manner to create more inclusive, transformative and generative narratives on professional responsibility. This is achieved by: Focusing on normative dimensions of professional work and combining these with a focus on empirical aspects of professional practice in a variety of setting, and Recognising the inevitable tensions between personal trust and responsibility, and largely depersonalised policies and strategies of quality control when normative and empirical aspects of professional responsibility are situated within their policy environments. The concluding narrative moves beyond deconstruction, complexity and critique of these considerations to a construction of new imagined horizons of professional responsibility from theoretical, conceptual and practical perspectives. This text sets out to transform professional responsibility through a re-configuration of its constituent elements in imaginative and creative ways and by indicating the ‘real world’ import of re-charting the field.