Teachers’ perspectives on ethics education–expressed as opportunities and challenges

Abstract

In Sweden, ethics education occupies a prominent position in the curriculum, both in the general, introductory sections and as a part of the subject religious education. The aim of this article is to investigate teachers’ insights regarding ethics education and to contribute knowledge about opportunities and challenges with ethics education, by analysing interviews with ten teachers. Five of the teachers used a fiction-based ethics education within a research and evaluation project, and five teachers used their ordinary ethics teaching. The analysis shows five different themes, time, the students’ background, safe relations, lesson plans, and fiction, to be crucial for ethics education, in relation to both opportunities and challenges. The analysis shows that ethics is a subject that occupies a special position, giving students an education that points to the world and provides opportunities to encounter and explore important situations, in other words, an education that develops a multidimensional ethical competence.