Moral Understanding Research Articles

Teachers' Humanistic Role in Teaching Mathematics Online During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Nepal

This study aimed to examine the teachers' humanistic role in terms of integrity, dignity, and freedom in online classes, and its effect on mathematics learning achievement. The cross-sectional survey design was carried out by taking 2260 students from school to tertiary levels in Nepal during the COVID-19 pandemic. T-test, ANOVA, and hierarchical regressions were the major statistical techniques used to yield the results in the research. The results showed that access to the internet, grades/levels, and availability of digital devices are significant in the practice of the humanistic role of teachers and students' learning achievement. Additionally, many factors such as teachers' equality and fair treatment, expression of negative emotions, and displaying energy and enthusiasm in teaching-learning activities, interest in students' well-being, extended moral support, positive attitude, and understanding of pressures and limitations of students are significant predictors in the achievement of mathematics.

VALUE AND MORAL INSIGHTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN BANDUNG

<p><em>Moral in the education sector is concerning, and some experts seek a solution to these problems. Understanding morals is essential because the accumulation of understanding of morals has an impact on the formation of attitudes and behaviour. As agents of change, college students are objects of moral education who become figures that will fulfil various sectors in social life: government, education, religion, industry, business, and others. This study focuses on how students' attitudes and behaviour view values and moral problems that occur among students. This analysis aims to know students' understanding of morals and their influence on student behavior attitudes in four universities in the city of Bandung: Nurtanio University, UIN Sunan Gunung Djati, Muhammadiyyah University Bandung, and STAI Persis Bandung. Another purpose is to know the types of moral education that influence students' thinking about morality and moral behavior in college. The method used in this study is statistical analysis. The data interpretation is through a questionnaire. The results will be analyzed using a phenomenological approach, where a researcher understands social actions and describes them by explaining the causes of these actions. Based on the results of the data and analysis regarding research, right action is manifested by one's personality and morals. The personality and morals are always consistent. The results of research show that students at tertiary institutions in Bandung demonstrate moral norms.</em></p>

Kepemimpinan K.H Abdul Aziz Choiri dalam Meningkatkan Kualitas Pemahaman Agama dan Akhlak Pada Santri di Pondok Pesantren Al-Ma’ruf 1 Kranggan Lamongan

This research is entitled Leadership K.H Abdul Aziz Choiri in improving the quality of understanding religion and morals in students at the Al-Ma’ruf 1 islamic boarding school Kranggan Lamongan. Al-Ma’ruf 1 islamic boarding school is the goal of the researcher because the islamic boarding school has its own characteristics, namely freeing all its students to choose formal education according to their wishes around the islmic boarding school so that apart from gaining religious knowledge they can also gain world knowledge through these formal institutions. The purpose of this study was to determine the leadership strategy and model of K.H Abdul Aziz Choiri in improving the quality of religious an moral understanding of students at the Al-Ma’ruf 1 Kranggan Lamongan. This research is a type of qualitative research an a phenomenological approach. From the results of this study. K.H Abdul Aziz Choiri has several models in his leadership, namely charismatic, adaptive, participatory, and entrepreneurial. The second is the strategy carried out by K.H Abdul Aziz Choiri in improving the quality of understanding religion and morals ini students, the strategy used by K.H Abdul Aziz Choiri is to set an example, teach, habituate, give gifts, and give threats or punishment.

Source of Moral Knowledge

One cannot deny the fact that we all have some understanding of moral issues. Each one of us can be said to have some sense of what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad, what ought to be done, and what ought not to be done. This moral understanding can be in the form of some vague idea, notion, or simply a gut feeling. No matter who the person is, from which culture or community the person belongs to, everybody faces a moral quandary sometime or other in one’s life. All of this presupposes that there is some fundamental sense or understanding of what is right and what is wrong. We all seem to have some understanding about actions that are right and those that are wrong. Some actions, for instance, torturing babies just for fun, killing an innocent person, raping, etc. are exemplars of morally wrong actions. Assisting a person in need, giving to famine relief, etc. on the other hand are examples of morally right actions. The present essay is an attempt to delve into the question of the source of moral knowledge. Three sources, experience, reason, and intuition have been identified. Views of philosophers like G.E Moore, WD Ross, Immanuel Kant, JS Mill, Plato, Samuel Clarke, Aristotle Hume, and Anthony Ashley Cooper have been discussed to gain clarity about the issue.

Assessing medical doctors' knowledge about medical ethics in health practices

Background: When it comes to protecting patients' rights and ensuring the quality of healthcare, medical ethics are of the utmost importance. Clinical specialists need a solid understanding of clinical morals to adhere to moral guidelines in the delivery of medical care. Objective: The study aims to determine, how well doctors in Lahore, Pakistan, are aware of medical ethics in health practices and their comprehension of healthcare ethical principles, guidelines, and decision-making processes knowledge and contribution. Methods: A cross-sectional review was conducted in Lahore with 350 health professionals from various medical services settings. The survey had unconditional and different decision inquiries to evaluate the comprehension specialists might interpret clinical morals using Medical Ethics Attitude Scale (MEAS). Results The findings of this analysis suggest that the opinions of medical professionals regarding how they adhere to medical ethics vary significantly. The professional respondents' mean score of 2.01 indicates a moderate level of agreement regarding medical ethics. To determine the significance of the differences in the assessment scores, an analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted. The ANOVA test resulted in an F-value of 69.87, indicating a highly significant association between the assessment scores and the variables related to knowledge of medical ethics practice.

The perils of utopia: Between ‘ethical static’ and moral perfectionism in Iran

Following the Iranian Revolution, ideologues within the Republican system promised the possibility of ethical perfection so long as Iranians adhered to guidelines promulgated by the state. Drawing on a case study of both critics and supporters of the government living in Mashhad, I argue that one of the inadvertent outcomes of this commitment to perfectionism has been its instrumentalization by government critics as a tool to condemn the behaviour of state supporters. Inconsistencies of behaviour demonstrated by state supporters were interpreted by these government critics as gross indecencies and major evils, rather than as part of a modality of ‘ethical static’ that has been advocated for as an understanding of everyday morality. The ethnographic tension in this article illuminates both the impacts of state-led projects of moral utopianism, and their ramifications for anthropology.

Towards a Moral Community: Moral Education Strategies in Indonesian Schools


 Moral education is a foundational yet contestable matter in any society. Debates about moral education help to define the parameters of true and right conduct in a society. The contestable nature of moral education curricula in Indonesia perhaps indicates the critical importance of character development in national and cultural formation and in the continuous creation and recreation of national identity. This study of the nature of moral education in junior secondary schools in the Yogyakarta region used a qualitative focus group approach. Teachers, lecturers, and trainee teachers were selected to be formed into five focus groups designed to provide a deeper analysis of the conflicting understandings of the nature of morality and of the expression of that morality in the curriculum. The findings showed several areas of contradiction and confusion in moral education in schools, including differences in religious and secular conceptualizations of morality and differences between those who wanted to promote or exclude intercultural understandings of morality within the state.
 Keywords: moral education, character education, morality, Pancasila, Indonesia

Culturally responsive research ethics: How the socio-ethical norms of Arr-nar/Kreng-jai inform research participation at the Thai-Myanmar border.

Despite advances, international research ethics guidelines still tend to consist of high-level ethical principles reflecting residual influence from North American and European traditions of ethics. Local ethics committees and community advisory boards can offer more culturally-sensitive approaches to training but most institutions lack substantive practical ethics guidance to engage rich moral understandings in day-to-day research practice in diverse cultural contexts. To address this gap, we conducted an international series of qualitative research ethics case studies, linked prospectively to active research programs in diverse settings. Here, we share findings from two case studies with a research team working on malaria and hepatitis B prevention with pregnant women in clinics serving migrants along the Thai-Myanmar border. In this sociocultural ethical analysis, we consider how core ethical requirements of voluntary participation, provision of fair benefits, and understandings of research risks and burdens are shaped, enriched, and in some instances challenged, by deep-seated and widespread Burmese, Karen and Thai cultural norms known as Arr-nar (in Burmese and Karen) or Kreng-jai (in Thai), encompassing multiple meanings including consideration for others and graciousness. We offer a model illustrating how one might map ethically significant sociocultural influences across the research practice pathway and close with lessons for developing a more culturally responsive research ethics practice in other international settings.

When not helping is nice: Children's changing evaluations of helping during COVID-19.

A key aspect of children's moral and social understanding involves recognizing the value of helpful behaviors. COVID-19 has complicated this process; behaviors generally considered praiseworthy were considered problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study examined whether 6- to 12-year-olds (N = 228; residing in the United States) adapt their evaluations of helpful behavior in response to shifting norms. Specifically, we presented children with scenarios featuring helpful and unhelpful actions that involved physical interaction (e.g., hugging) or nonphysical interaction (e.g., recruiting a teacher); although all children were tested during the COVID-19 pandemic, stories portrayed individuals either before or during COVID-19. While children generally judged helpfulness positively and unhelpfulness negatively, children exhibited a selective shift in their judgments for COVID-19 scenarios: children considered helpfulness negatively and unhelpfulness positively if helping required physical interaction. These findings demonstrate that children flexibly tune their social evaluations of helping to align with evolving norms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding Chinese Moral Stories with Further Pre-Training

The goal of moral understanding is to grasp the theoretical concepts embedded in a narrative by delving beyond the concrete occurrences and dynamic personas. Specifically, the narrative is compacted into a single statement without involving any characters within the original text, necessitating a more astute language model that can comprehend connotative morality and exhibit commonsense reasoning. The “pretraining + fine-tuning” paradigm is widely embraced in neural language models. In this paper, we propose an intermediary phase to establish an improved paradigm of “pre-training + further pre-training + finetuning”. Further pre-training generally refers to continual learning on task-specific or domain-relevant corpora before being applied to target tasks, which aims at bridging the gap in data distribution between the phases of pre-training and fine-tuning. Our work is based on a Chinese dataset named STORAL-ZH that composes of 4k human-written story-moral pairs. Furthermore, we design a two-step process of domain-adaptive pre-training in the intermediary phase. The first step depends on a newly-collected Chinese dataset of Confucian moral culture. And the second step bases on the Chinese version of a frequently-used commonsense knowledge graph (i.e. ATOMIC) to enrich the backbone model with inferential knowledge besides morality. By comparison with several advanced models including BERTbase, RoBERTa-base and T5-base, experimental results on two understanding tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed three-phase paradigm.

POLA PENGASUHAN DAN PENINGKATAN ASPEK PERKEMBANGAN PENGETAHUAN MORAL MELALUI GERAK DAN LAGU PADA ANAK USIA DINI

Moral development needs to be instilled from an early age, including awareness of gender differences. Moral instillation in children will hopefully have implications for their awareness and sensitivity about pro-social conditions that must be built properly. One of the actions of instilling moral education through music activities is movement and the song "touch is not allowed". The aims of the study were 1) to describe the implementation of movement and song activities in improving children's sexual moral education, 2) to find out the results of the development of sexual moral education in children. The research method used was Classroom Action Research (PTK) which was carried out in two cycles in Group A2 RA Mujahidin Sumberkima Bali. The research data was collected through observation techniques, documentation, and analysis of child development outcomes. The results of the study concluded that 1) activities to increase the knowledge of AUD sexual Moral Education through gestures and touching songs are not permitted by mentioning which limbs may be touched and which cannot be touched, singing and imitating movements and songs, touching is not permitted, 2) movement activities and songs are able increasing the development of children's sexual moral understanding in cycle 1 by 53% and increasing in cycle II by 92% and this shows the category of achieving the target of completeness. The results of this study indicate that knowledge of sexual moral education by practicing movements and songs has implications for increasing knowledge of sexual moral education in early childhood at this research location.

'I'm provax': Pro-vaccination personal histories and socialities of older Australians in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vaccination scholarship often explores how social networks foster vaccine refusal and delay, revealing how social and institutional relations produce refusing or delaying parents and un- or under-vaccinated children. It is likewise critical to understand the development of pro-vaccination orientations by researching those who want to be vaccinated since such attitudes and associated practices underpin successful vaccination programmes. This article explores pro-vaccination sociality, personal histories and self-understandings during the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia. We draw upon 18 in-depth interviews with older Western Australians, documenting how they articulate 'provax' identities in opposition to those they depict as 'antivax' others. Provax identities were clearly anchored in and solidified through social relations and personal histories, as interviewees spoke of 'likeminded' friends and families who facilitated each other's vaccinations and referenced childhood experiences of epidemics and vaccinations. Access barriers relating to the vaccine programme drove interviewees to reimagine their provax status in light of not yet being vaccinated. Thus, interviewees' moral and ideological understandings of themselves and others were interrelated with supply-side constraints. We examine the development of self-proclaimed 'provaxxers' (in a context of limited access); how they imagine and enact boundaries between themselves and those they deem 'antivax'; and possibilities for public health research.

The Relationship Between Empathy and Moral Judgement in Typical and Clinical Populations

As a critical role in moral psychology, empathy and moral judgment have been studied by many psychologists and have promoted people's cognition and understanding of morality. Although there have been a lot of experiments that explored empathy and moral judgment separately, the relationship between the two has been neglected. It is not known how empathy and moral judgment interact. This review explored moral judgment and empathy’s relationship in typical and clinical populations. This review can provide an in-depth exploration of the study of existing experimental results and research, and an analysis of the relationship between the two. The study of the relationship between empathy and moral judgment can deepen the field of psychological understanding of the process of making moral judgments. According to the review of existing studies, it was found that empathy can affect people's moral judgment in both typical and clinical populations along with age, sex, and different scenarios.

Existentialism and Its Influence on Our Understanding of Knowledge, Truth, Morality, Values, and Religion

Existentialism is a philosophical movement that has had a significant impact on our understanding of knowledge, truth, morality, values, and religion. This research aims to explore the influence of existentialism on these fundamental aspects of human existence. The research methodology involved an extensive review of literature from prominent existentialist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The findings of this research highlight that existentialism challenges the traditional view of objective truth and knowledge, emphasizing the subjective and personal experience of individuals. Furthermore, existentialism posits that individuals must create their own values and meaning in life, rather than relying on external sources such as religion or society. In terms of morality, existentialism emphasizes the individual's responsibility for their actions, as opposed to being governed by universal ethical principles. The limitations of this research include the focus on Western existentialist philosophy, neglecting other cultural and philosophical traditions. The contribution of this research is that it sheds light on the influence of existentialism on various aspects of human existence and highlights the significance of subjective experience and personal responsibility. The practical implication of this research is that it provides insight into the importance of individualism and personal agency in various domains, such as education, mental health, and politics. The novelty of this research lies in the comprehensive exploration of existentialism's influence on various aspects of human existence, providing a unique perspective on these topics.

Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives ed. by Thijs Porck and Harriet Soper

Reviewed by: Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives ed. by Thijs Porck and Harriet Soper Timothy D. Arner thijs porck and harriet soper, eds., Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Pp. xii, 369. isbn: 978–90–04–49929–4. $194. Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives literally considers some age-old questions: how does the human body change throughout its lifetime? What is the relationship between physical, emotional, and intellectual maturity? How is the biological process of aging conditioned by one’s social environment? The essays in this volume look for answers in a range of sources from pre-Conquest England, and, in so doing, provide a rich account of perspectives on the stages of human development. The collection helpfully groups the essays into four sections with three essays in each. Part I is dedicated to ‘Defining and Dividing the Life Course,’ with the first two essays examining how stages of the human life course were classified in early medieval English texts. Thijs Porck’s ‘The Ages of Man and the Ages of Woman in Early Medieval England: From Bede to Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the Tractatus de quaternario’ describes different approaches to categorizing life stages in Old English [End Page 102] and Anglo-Norman manuscripts. Tracing aging schemata as represented through three key works, Porck demonstrates that ‘early medieval English authors stuck to a flexible but uniform definition of the human life course’ (p. 45), and he identifies a significant shift in this paradigm during the twelfth century. Daria Izdebska’s essay surveys vocabulary for describing the stages of life throughout the Old English corpus, linking the various words used to describe infancy, youth, maturity, and old age to their Latin equivalents and to the Old English lexemes associated with these phases. These essays are followed by a discussion of an individual’s particular and influential understanding of aging and maturity, as Darren Barber’s ‘Alcuin and the Student Life Cycle’ highlights Alcuin’s writings about how one’s development through the stages of youth allows greater possibilities for moral and spiritual education. The second set of essays on ‘The Life Course and the Human Body’ considers the discourse around significant bodily changes or events. Jacqueline Fay’s ‘Treating Age in Medical Texts from Early Medieval England’ offers the field’s first look at ‘how, or even if, Old English medieval remedies are inflected by age’ (p. 118) and how these texts define normative and non-normative bodies with regard to age, gender, and bodily strength. Caroline R. Batten examines Old English obstetric remedies, demonstrating how the pregnant female body is more consistently associated with death than the creation and nurturing of life. In ‘The Theology of Puberty in Early Medieval England,’ Elaine Flowers shows how ‘the biological process of puberty in pre-Conquest England . . . generated theological consequences associated with leaving an age of spiritual innocence behind’ (p. 160). Focusing almost exclusively on the male body as a pubescent subject, theological discourse describes sexual temptation as both a challenge and opportunity for young men to demonstrate moral understanding and self-control. The essays in ‘Part III: Intergenerational Dynamics’ concern how names, knowledge, and goods are passed down to create a sense of individual identity within a community. James Chetwood’s essay on naming and renaming demonstrates how names were bestowed not only at birth but throughout one’s life to signal familial and social bonds. Just as Flowers’ essay in Part II considers the theological discourse regarding bodily processes, Katherine Cross examines how eighth- and ninth-century ecclesiastical texts refer to the weaning of infants as both a natural life process and a metaphor for spiritual instruction. Amy Faulkner’s essay on treasure describes how Genesis A presents an ideal model for aristocratic inheritance that Beowulf shows to be prone to disruption. The volume’s final section considers ‘Life Beyond the Human.’ Gale R. Owen-Crocker demonstrates how object biography can reveal ‘The Life Course of Artefacts’ as she examines the Orkney Hood, the Bayeux Tapestry, the Sutton Hoo Hanging Bowl and Shield, and early English manuscripts. The final essay places the linear life course of human development alongside the...

The Moral and Religious Thought of Yi Hwang (Toegye): A Study of Korean Neo-Confucian Ethics and Spirituality by Edward Y.J. Ching (review)

Reviewed by: The Moral and Religious Thought of Yi Hwang (Toegye): A Study of Korean Neo-Confucian Ethics and Spirituality by Edward Y.J. Ching Maria Hasfeldt Long (bio) The Moral and Religious Thought of Yi Hwang (Toegye): A Study of Korean Neo-Confucian Ethics and Spirituality. By Edward Y.J. Ching. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. vii + 204. Hardcover $99.00, isbn 978-3-030-77923-8. In recent years, the study of Korean Neo-Confucianism as an international field has been growing exponentially. Compared to former decades, the number of international publications has grown significantly over the last ten years, with Edward Y.J. Chung as one of the most active scholars. The Moral and Religious Thought of Yi Hwang (Toegye): A Study of Korean Neo-Confucian Ethics and Spirituality is the culmination of an almost decade-long study of the Korean Neo-Confucian scholar, Yi Hwang Toegye (1501–1570). With a focus on the moral and spiritual aspects of the theories of Toegye, Chung maps out a brilliant overview of the philosopher's worldview and literary works. Chung's primary objective is to provide "thought-provoking" and fresh insights into one of the most important Korean Neo-Confucian thinkers in history, as well as shed light on Neo-Confucian thought in general and how Toegye's philosophy in particular can be relevant in modern interreligious dialogues (p. 149). Consisting of ten chapters, where each chapter could serve as an individual article, Chung takes the reader through the core concepts of Toegye and his development of a form of self-cultivation different from the Chinese Neo-Confucian idea of self-cultivation. This together created a holistic religious worldview with a strong spiritual dimension, which manifests through selfcultivation practices. The first two chapters introduce Toegye and the historical context of 16th-century Joseon-dynasty Korea (1392–1910); his understanding of the Neo-Confucian tradition as the true learning; and his rejection of Daoism and Buddhism. With the reader introduced to the immediate historical context and Neo-Confucian discourse of the time, the following three chapters cover Toegye's religious and moral understanding of the relationship between the Heavenly Principle (C. tianli, K. cheolli) and human nature (C. renxing, K. inseong). Furthermore, Chung covers the moral-spiritual implications that the Four-Seven Debate had on Toegye's later practical self-cultivation for becoming a sage. In short, the debate concerns the relation between the "four sprouts" of human characteristics as first described by Mengzi (ca. 371–289 BCE) and the seven human emotions mentioned in various classical texts. Toegye believed in the doctrine that the "experience of Heaven was within oneself" (p. 47). Therefore, [End Page 1] to become a sage, one would have to commit to the active practice of an inner feeling of reverence (C. jing, K. gyeong) daily. Chapter six dives into the spiritual practice of self-reflection and mind cultivation (C. xinxue, K. simhak), which was an ongoing process that would lead the practitioner closer to sagehood. The seventh chapter focuses on how this spiritual dimension of Toegye's doctrine is relevant to broader discussions of ecology today. With a strong love for nature, Toegye incorporated the idea of nature within his spiritual self-cultivation, which Chung elaborates on. It was important for the human being to be in harmony with Heaven, earth, and all myriad things. This meant respecting and spending time in nature also played a part in the daily practice of spiritual self-cultivation. Moving on, in chapters eight and nine, Chung presents a comparative study on the philosophical and theological question of how to transcend evil, as well as the matter of interreligious dialogue. By way of a textual-interpretive approach, Chung compares Toegye's thought with Christian contra Buddhist theological ideas and how these findings can help develop an interreligious approach. In chapter nine, Chung suggests that the idea of self-transcendence through self-cultivation can be the ultimate reality. In this chapter, Chung wants to break with the tendency in interreligious dialogue where many scholars rely heavily on Christian theological terms. Chung introduces Neo-Confucian concepts and terms, especially the terms used by Toegye. The last and concluding chapter...

Education of purposefulness of students of higher education in the process of sectional classes

The article examines the content of education of purposefulness of students of higher education in the process of sectional classes. Scientific research devoted to the aspects of solving the problems of raising the moral and volitional qualities of pupils and students in the process of sectional classes and physical culture is highlighted. It is revealed how the main concepts of the researched category are interpreted in the scientific literature, namely, what is "will", "individual purposefulness", "education of purposefulness in physical culture and health activities". It is thoroughly described what knowledge and skills we tried to form among student youth in the process of sectional classes (awareness by students of higher education of purposefulness as an important moral and volitional quality and understanding of the need to cultivate this quality in modern conditions; interest in sectional classes in swimming, gymnastics and volleyball, sports history of Ukraine and traditions; the desire to systematically attend and participate in sectional classes; students' readiness for purposefulness as an important moral and volitional quality in the process of sectional classes, willful desire; students' ability to show purposefulness, responsibility in practice, etc.). It is emphasized that the experimental work was based on the subject-subject interaction of the learner-teacher-coach from the chosen sport. The process of raising the purposefulness of students of higher education in the course of sectional classes is built on the basis of psychological and pedagogical concepts: personally oriented education, personal development training; principles: visibility, accessibility, systematicity, subject-subject interaction. The most effective methods of educating higher education seekers in the process of sectional classes are: the method of creating a situation of success, competition, game method, encouragement, assignments, the method of problem situations and requirements, the method of personal example, persuasion, and others. The results of experimental work on the studied phenomenon show that the use of updated content in unity with traditional and modern educational methods during swimming, gymnastics, and volleyball classes is effective.

Expanding the Client’s Perspective

AbstractHawley introduced the idea of the client's perspective on knowledge, which she used to illuminate knowing-how and cases of epistemic injustice involving knowing-how. In this paper, I explore how Hawley's idea might be used to illuminate not only knowing-how, but other forms of knowledge that, like knowing-how, are often claimed to be distinct from mere knowing-that, focusing on the case studies of moral understanding and ‘what it is like’-knowledge.

Vērtību aspekts kvalitatīvas izglītības nodrošināšanai

Values guide the cultural, economic and educational spheres, shaping the collective knowledge of society that is passed from one generation to the next. Values are sustainable, motivating and influence people's emotional state and behaviour in stressful situations. Values acquisition can also be defined as the learning of values that takes place in the family, in society and in school. Values education is carried out in a scientific, systematic, planned and targeted manner. It aims at translating acquired/learned values into real-life actions of the individual. A constructivist approach to values education is becoming relevant, based on the active development of an individual's moral understanding, processes of social interaction and moral discourse. The values acquired by a person are the result of his or her active action and life experience. The choice of a profession is also strongly influenced by the values that a person holds, both personal and societal values. Personal development, material values, contribution to the common good of society, pleasure and satisfaction may have different meanings for different individuals. Creativity, reducing tensions and stress, and taking responsibility have become relevant values in the 21st century labour market. However, an individual's views and values in the context of their chosen profession may also change in the face of difficulties. Pro-social values that contribute to the common good of society as a whole therefore become important. Values underpin decision-making in all areas of private and public life. The influence of education on the process of values formation in society is considerable. However, the adoption of values is also influenced by the challenges that have become topical today, including environmental, economic and social challenges, which include the consequences of global warming and climate change, the regular and unpredictable emergence from comfort zones, human competition with the opportunities offered by modern technology, migration, urbanisation, and increasing social and cultural diversity. In the 21st century, humanity is also confronted with epidemic and security challenges. Therefore, reasoning, scientific explanations, discussions on dilemmas with moral implications, and decision-making in real-life situations become important in value education. Competency-based curriculum change implies that education is an ecosystem with multiple stakeholders: students, teachers, school leaders, parents, community representatives, etc. Values acceptance is also the outcome of a learning process based on the principles of constructivism and social constructivism, fostering knowledge and understanding of values through reflection and contemplation of own behaviour and the behaviour of others' and actions, gaining deeper knowledge, insight and understanding of oneself, others and society as a whole.

Gender inequity and COVID-19 vaccination policies for pregnant women in the Americas

The region of the Americas has been the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic’s worst outcome in terms of number of deaths due to COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy and the postpartum period has been found to be associated with increased risk of mortality and severe disease. Several Latin American and Caribbean countries have disproportionally high maternal mortality rates due to COVID-19. Although this region achieved relatively high vaccination rates among the general adult population, there were differing restrictions regarding the vaccination of those who were pregnant. In a pandemic, policies reflect political priorities in responses to the threats posed to populations and play an important role in promoting gender equity. This paper reports the results of an ethical analysis of 45 national COVID-19 vaccination public policies from seven countries – Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and United States. The analysis drew on reproductive justice and feminist bioethics frameworks, paying close attention to whether and how gender and social and economic inequities were addressed. It found that exclusionary approaches in immunization policies which restricted access to vaccination during pregnancy were often justified on the basis of a lack of evidence about the effects of immunization of pregnant persons, and on the grounds of medical expertise, to the detriment of women’s autonomy and agency. As such these policies reiterate patriarchal moral understandings of women, pregnancy and motherhood. In practice, they counter human rights gender equity and equality principles, and became lethal, particularly to racialized women in Latin America. During an emerging lethal disease, policies and policy development must consider the intersection of oppressive structures to protect and guarantee rights of women, girls, and pregnant persons.