Finding a voice : SDGs, ethical identity and the curriculum

Abstract

The first part of this chapter briefly examines SDGs education research suggesting that – even though a wide range of initiatives in the field of responsible management education have been put in place – the level of integration of responsibility and sustainability into professional and managerial education/HE is still insufficient. This is reinforced by research into professional ethics which suggests that recent graduates do not effectively identify with the ethical values of organisational or professional ethics, and thus have little commitment to such values in practice. This leads to a focus on the key modes of responsibility, and the three practices which undergird the development of responsibility: deliberation, narrative development, and dialogue. The second part sets out the principles behind an integrated approach to ethics teaching in HE, which focuses on the practice of responsibility, accountability and creative responsibility, as key to learning in general and to ethical development in particular. This is embodied in pedagogy for critical moral consciousness focused in: critical reflection; holistic decision making; dialogue (engaging complexity and difference); mutual accountability; and the exercise of the moral imagination. These stresses both the development of ethical autonomy and positive engagement with plural community (be those professions, institutions, such as universities, or intermediate organisations such as religions) but also the nature of learning. This also from the basis for leadership at all levels of the organisation and beyond. The third and largest part of the chapter will set how ethical identity can be developed in the curriculum, involving a fourfold strategy and related examples of teaching:-Establishing with the parent university key curriculum outcomes focused on responsibility and key ethical virtues. This will detail how virtues such as courage relate to intellectual and psychological virtues, and thus to employability; -Developing ethical teaching based in identity, with modules or parts of modules over three years focused in student identity, professional identity, global identity, and how these relate to personal identity; -Developing pedagogy which focuses on the practice of mutual dialogue and decision making. The pedagogic examples will include student dialogue with university administrators, different professions, and community stakeholders;-Developing integration with the other modules in the curriculum, e.g. through focus across modules on the same professional decision making frameworks, and skills of reflective practice. The examples given will focus on a holistic view of professional practice and ethics through reflection on identity and practice, offering an account of how ethical behaviour can be motivated in the learning environment, and link directly to the SDGs.