Abstract
Early childhood ethics education has been of longstanding interest for philosophers, psychologists, and those with interests in child development and education more generally. The significance of early childhood education remains vital today, with an expanding focus on ethical, social, and emotional education in pre- and primary classrooms. Taken together, and given the confluence of several areas of development in early childhood—cognitive, moral, social, and emotional—this period of life presents robust opportunities for ethics education. I conceptualize ethics education in early childhood in two broad ways: first, as an educational process embedded in the child’s experience of the school as a sociomoral environment that can provide important, if indirect, opportunities for ethical learning and development. Second, I take up ethics education in the child’s participation in specific ethics and social-emotional learning programs for classroom, home, and broader community use. While presenting a range of approaches to early childhood ethics education, I argue for the benefits of methodological pluralism, identifying the many continuities and opportunities for collaboration across the theoretical and practical divisions set up in the field of ethics education, and call for collaborative teacher-researcher partnerships in order to develop effective ethics education programming.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite the unique opportunities for ethics education in early childhood a recent survey article on forty years of scholarship (1971–2011) in the Journal of Moral Education (arguably the leading academic journal in the area of moral education and related research), notes a “near absence of papers on moral education in childhood and early learning” (Lee and Taylor 2013, 423). Given this absence in the Journal of Moral Education and the comparative importance of education in early childhood, this chapter will contribute to filling an important gap in ethics education literature.
- 2.
- 3.
This is not to say that Dewey argues against curricula or structured education in the classroom, or neglects the role of the adult educator as such. Rather, Dewey is interested in a particular kind of educational structure, combining the adult’s experience and pedagogical skill sets with the native interests and experiences of children to form productive and engaging educational experience that will be a motivating force for the child, even when a guiding adult is not present. In Experience and Education (1938), Dewey discusses this process in terms of the interaction of objective (the learning environment, past knowledge, pedagogical resources, etc.) and internal (students’ attitudes, interests, desires, etc.) conditions of educational experience (42, 45).
- 4.
For discussions of and research on the effectiveness of prominent early childhood SEL programs—such as Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS), Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS), Second Step, and FunFRIENDS, among others—see Denham and Weissberg (2004) and McCabe and Altamura (2011).
- 5.
I use the terms (here and below) constructivist, moral, and character education to mark prominent, if broad, distinctions in the field of ethics education. However, in using these distinctions I do not wish to further reify theoretical and practical separations between these approaches, nor are these terms used in uniform ways in ethics education literature. As I will argue, in both practice and theory, there are many commonalities and areas of overlap between constructivist, moral, and character education (see Section “Toward an Integrated Approach to Early Childhood Ethics Education” below).
- 6.
A vast literature on conducting moral discussions with young children, including specific lesson plans and activities for this purpose, exists in the field of philosophy for children. See Lone (2012), Wartenberg (2014), and Lone and Burroughs (2016). For additional resources, also see the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization (PLATO), a national non-profit organization devoted to supporting philosophical discussion in Pre-K—12 classrooms: www.plato-philosophy.org.
- 7.
Reporting on data from the U.S. Department of Education in 2001, Howard et al. (2004) report that “forty-five states and the District of Columbia received and implemented character education pilot grants through the U.S. Department of Education…in years 1995 through 2001” (209). Character education initiatives have also been central to the educational policies of several U.S. Presidents, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. As a result, and due to additional efforts of national character education and advocacy programs such as Character Counts! (www.charactercounts.org) and the Character Education Partnership (www.character.org), character education programs are mandated or strongly encouraged in most states.
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Acknowledgements
Much of this chapter was composed during my time as a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy, Education, and Psychology, at the University of Verona, Italy. I thank my colleagues at the University of Verona for their support which aided in my completion of this project.
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Burroughs, M.D. (2018). Ethics Across Early Childhood Education. In: Englehardt, E.E., Pritchard, M.S. (eds) Ethics Across the Curriculum—Pedagogical Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78939-2_15
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