Research On The Professional Ethics Dilemma Of Preschool Teachers

This study defines “Preschool Teachers' Professional Ethical Dilemmas” as follows: The preschool teachers encounter two or more different,conflicting ethical rules or duties in dealing with children,parents and colleagues,hard to make proper decisions constrained by complex factors in professional practice.Teaching involves moral action.Teacher are moral agents and every detail of kindergarten education is full of ethical implication.Hence,preschool teachers are inevitably face a variety of ethical conflicts or dilemmas in professional practice.What kind of ethical dilemmas do preschool teachers encounter in professional practice? How to explain and deal better with these ethical dilemmas? These problems are the logical starting point and aim of this study.To answer the above questions,this paper starts from the perspective of ethical relations,and describe the ethical dilemmas of preschool teachers faced in their work,to find out the reasons of the ethical dilemmas and put forward the corresponding countermeasures.Because the study contained sensitive ethical issues and moral judgments is of implicit characteristics,the research mainly uses interview methods,supplemented by observation method and case analysis method.There are ten teachers from Guangzhou city participated in the interview.They were asked to provide stories describing difficult ethical situations they had encountered.Observation and case method participated in depth research on how teachers perceive and cope with ethical dilemmas in their work.The present study aims to tackle these very issues through critical incident analysis.The study found that from a total of 80 critical incidents,the preschool teachers mainly encounter 8 kinds of ethical dilemmas in their professional practice,and most of the ethical dilemmas are concerned with children.When nursing and educating the kids,the teacher's dilemmas mainly lie in strictness versus kindness,democracy versus authority,fair versus caring.When communicating with the parents,the teacher's dilemmas mainly lie in meeting the needs of the parents versus following the inner law of preschool education,trust versus trust crisis,respecting the value of parents versus adhering to their own concept.When dealing with colleagues,the teacher's dilemmas mainly lie in loyalty to colleagues versus be responsible for the children,be accountable to the leaders versus be responsible for the children.For ethical dilemmas faced by teachers in the professional practice,this study analyzes deeply from four aspects: value diversity,multiplicity of target group,lacking support from external environment and the inadequacies of teachers' ethical knowledge.In addition,lacking support from external environment including that the current code of ethics failure to provide effective guidance,lacking of humanistic care in kindergarten,the particularly sensitive to “child abuse” and “sexual assault” of public opinion,neglecting of professional training for preschool teachers.Based on the above reasons,this study proposes suggestions to deal with dilemmas from two ways.Firstly,by formulating the preschool teachers' ethical codes,constructing the people-oriented campus culture,advocating rational communication of public opinion,and training ethical knowledge for preschool teachers to improve the external environment.Secondly,increasing preschool teachers' autonomy would help them promote the strategy when facing a dilemma.