Ethical Issues in Reporting on Teacher Candidate Perspectives in a Cultural Diversity Course: Increasing Trustworthiness, Protecting Participants, and Improving Practice

Abstract

While the study of practice is first and foremost for our current and future teacher candidates, teacher educators’ research into practice is also aimed at improvement in the wider education community. Thus, self-studies of practice must also be guided by ethical purposes: improving practice, demonstrating trustworthiness as research, and, most importantly, ensuring that teacher candidates are safe while the research is conducted and after it has been disseminated. This chapter focuses on the ethical issues raised by reporting on teacher candidates perspectives in a cultural diversity course in which many controversial issues are raised. The benefits of collecting and reporting teacher candidate perspectives are juxtaposed with the risks relation to four themes. The first theme, increasing trustworthiness, addresses the value of this type of research to the field of teacher education and the steps taken to ensure rigour and trustworthiness. The second, protecting participants in scholarship, attends to the dilemmas in sharing participants’ perspectives in research studies. The third theme, improving practice, illustrates how the collection of teacher candidate data contributes to pedagogy during and after the course. The final theme, protecting teacher candidates in class, addresses the potential risks to participants who reveal their perspectives during the course.