Ethics and school language didactics

Summary

In school education, teachers in general, and language-culture teachers in particular, are always individually aware of their moral duties towards their students, and of the values they have to train them in. The thesis I defend in this 1994 article is that the discipline of language didactics now has several reasons to develop its own professional ethics, to make them known and to assert them. This article was written and published in the same year as my Essay on Eclecticism (1994e): not surprisingly, I emphasize here the consequences of the disappearance of methodologies on the need for teachers to constantly evaluate the effects of their teaching methods on their students: "Eclecticism mechanically confronts the ethical problematic because the methodological choices have become personal choices." This disappearance of methodologies, which until now have been both the tools and the reference objectives of language teacher training, also obliges trainers to develop their own ethics of professional training.

First publication: Les Langues modernes, n° 3 1994, pp. 55-62, available from the Gallica site of the BNF: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9691027q. 

French version available at: www.christianpuren.com/mes-travaux-liste-et-liens/1994b/.

English version with summary and web links published in November 2022, also available at: www.researchgate.net/publication/365361346.