Integrity in Teaching: Recognizing the Fusion of the Moral and Intellectual

Abstract

In this article we examine the relationship between teaching as a knowledge endeavor and teaching as a moral enterprise, using episodes from our own elementary school teaching as sites for our analysis. One episode concerns the teaching of social studies, the second the teaching of mathematics. We first describe the episodes themselves, highlighting the ways in which they shed light on issues of pedagogical content knowledge and reasoning. We then revisit each episode with a different lens: that of teaching as moral work. Our framework consists of two essential components: concerns for subject matter and for students. This analysis is meant to be neither a complete delineation of teaching as a moral enterprise nor an exhaustive analysis of pedagogical content knowledge. It is meant to show that, in teaching, concerns for the intellectual and the moral are ultimately inseparable.