Appendix C: The reflective practitioner
more of an effort to explain the relevant background research, or readers must educate themselves about the
research. The latter activity is not necessarily difficult (the background knowledge for Saltzstein's work, for
example, took me only a few paragraphs to explain in writing), but it must be done to make full sense of research
that tries to provide a universal framework of psychological knowledge.
The reader's role: interested observer of children
In conducting and reporting their research, Saltzstein and his colleagues were not presenting themselves as
school teachers, nor were they expecting readers necessarily to respond as teachers. As they put it in the first
paragraph of the article, they sought to offer "a more contextualized perspective for understanding the development
of moral judgments" [p. 37]. Unlike most teachers, they seemed indifferent to recommending how children's moral
judgements ought to be fostered. Observation of children was their purpose, not intervention. The meaning of the
term "contextualized perspective" was not obvious to Kelvin when he first read it, but eventually it became clearer:
they were talking about the importance of distinguishing among types of moral decisions and moral beliefs. They
did sometimes note information relevant to teaching—for example, they pointed out that for cultural reasons,
teachers in Brazil do not command high respect and therefore compared to American children, Brazilian children
may feel less compelled to tell the truth to their teachers. But this comment was not the primary focus of their
research, nor did the authors discuss what (if anything) it might imply about teaching in the United States.
Yet the non-teaching perspective of the article did not keep Kelvin, a long-time school teacher and current
university teacher, from reflecting on the article in terms of its educational relevance. As we mentioned already,
Kelvin was attracted to the article because of his own concerns about character development in students—how do
they acquire moral beliefs and commitments, and how should he help them in doing so? Kelvin did not really expect
to find an answer to the second of these questions, given the "observation" orientation of the authors. He did hope
to find an answer to the first, although even here he also expected that to make allowances for the fact that research
interviews are not usually identical to classroom situations. Children might respond differently when interviewed
individually by a researcher, compared to how they might respond to a teacher in class. Or perhaps not. So in
reflecting on the article, Kelvin had to note the context and purposes of Saltzstein's study, and to remind himself
that once a teacher went beyond simply observing children to intervening on their behalf, the teacher might be led
to different conclusions about children’s moral development. But in spite of these cautions—or maybe because of
them—Kelvin found much food for thought in the article related to teaching.
Example #2: Learning disability as a misleading label
In 2006, Ray McDermott, Shelley Goldman, and Hervé Varenne published an article that discussed the use
of disability categories in education. The article attracted Kelvin’s attention because he had been concerned
for a long time about the ambiguities of disability categories (see Chapter 5 of this book) as well as about
their potential for stigmatizing individuals. He expected the article to document additional problems with
labeling when a student is from a non-white ethnic group. Kelvin’s expectation was fulfilled partially, but he
was surprised also to encounter an additional and tougher message in the article. Here is how the study
began:
Since about 1850...classifying human beings by
mental ability, accurately or not, has been a politicallyKelvin had a mixed reaction to this opening. In one
way it seemed to say something familiar—that