Appendix C: The reflective practitioner
which they assume you have or hope that you will acquire. For each example, we describe the reactions of one of us
(Kelvin Seifert) as he read the article.
Example #1: How do children acquire moral commitments?
In 1997, Herbert Saltzstein and several colleagues published a research-oriented article about how
children acquire moral beliefs (Saltzstein, et al., 1997). The group of researchers were all graduate students
and professors of psychology, working mostly at the City University of New York. When Kelvin read of their
affiliation with psychology, he suspected that they would talk about moral beliefs in general, and not
necessarily about moral issues in classrooms, such as cheating or treating classmates with care and respect.
Still, the article interested Kelvin as a former teacher and current university professor, because he had long
been concerned with fostering qualities like integrity, honesty, cooperation, and loyalty in students. If Kelvin
could find out about the mechanism or process by which children acquire mature moral beliefs, he reasoned,
maybe he could modify his teaching to take advantage of that knowledge.
So Kelvin began reading the article. He discovered some parts were challenging and required careful reflection,
whereas others were easier to read. One of the most challenging passages came almost immediately, in the second
and third paragraphs; these paragraphs, it seemed, required a bit of prior knowledge about theories of moral
development. But Kelvin was willing to concentrate more fully on these paragraphs, because he expected that they
might clarify the rest of the study. Here are the paragraphs, and some of Kelvin’s thoughts as he read them:
Initial problem: We began by re-examining the
phenomenon of heteronomy, Piaget's assertion
(1932/1965) following Kant (1785/1959) that young
children equate moral obligation with deference to
authority when justifying their moral judgments. The
concept is important because it is central to the
organismic account of moral development as a series of
differentiations and integrations.... [p. 37]This was one of the difficult paragraphs, perhaps
especially because Kelvin had never read the specific book
by Piaget or by the philosopher Kant. But Kelvin did recall
reading, at various times over the years, about Piaget's
views on moral development. Piaget believed that at first,
children define morality in terms of what adults think: an
action is "good" if and only if adults (e.g. parents)
consider it good, and "bad" if and only if adults consider it
bad. This is the idea of "heteronomy" to which Saltzstein
is referring. Children, in this view, take quite awhile to
develop or "grow" into truly autonomous moral beliefs.
Autonomous beliefs form slowly out of earlier beliefs, in
the way that a young plant or animal might grow. This is
the "organismic account of moral development" that
Saltzstein is talking about....This account has been challenged by Turiel's
domain theory (Turiel, 1983). According to Turiel and
his colleagues, even young children intuitively
distinguish moral from conventional rules. [p. 37]Here was an idea that was intriguing! Saltzstein and
his colleagues were pointing to research (by the person
cited, named Turiel) that suggests that even
preschoolers know the difference between truly moral