Vol. 1 No. 3 (2003): Values and Ethics in Educational Administration

CONSTITUTIVE VALUES AND DAILY PRACTICE IN A SWEDISH SCHOOL

Schooling is always a moral practice. It takes place inspecific contexts where social regulation is justified byreference to ethical codes and their specific values.Teachers' work is constituted by these values. Teachers actmorally, steering practice in particular directions. The taskis, however, never simple. In a context where the curriculumprovides an ethical framework and schooling operateswithin a moral framework, there is a perpetual struggle toalign personal values, school practices and the constitutivevalues of the national curriculum. This paper focuses on thatstruggle. It builds on a field study which investigates therelationship between school practices and the constitutivevalues explicitly endorsed in the Swedish nationalcurriculum. Episodes of moral steering are presentedtogether with the teachers' subsequent evaluation of theseincidents. These episodes suggest that insofar as individualbeliefs and moment-by-moment responses may lead toactions which counteract constitutive values, moral practicemust also be a deliberative practice where alternatives areweighed and courses of action are adopted.