Preparing Preservice Teachers to Teach Academic Integrity and Ethics

Abstract

The inclusion of ethics and integrity in preservice teacher education can refer to several contexts. The first context is academic integrity for preservice teachers with a focus on incorporating academic integrity in their own studies within higher education, as well as teaching them different components of academic writing including proper referencing techniques to enable them to write their own academic texts. The second context is developing the professional ethics of these future teachers, as a lived practice as well as through ethical codes. The third context is giving preservice teachers pedagogical and didactic knowledge and instruments to teach academic integrity and ethics to their future students in primary and secondary education, in order to prepare them for their own higher education endeavours. While attention is paid to the first and the second context, the third one is only rarely treated as a part of preservice teacher education as it is usually assumed that the first context is indirectly giving enough preparation for a preservice teacher to subsequently mediate ethics and integrity to his or her students. In this paper, we argue that this assumption is problematic and propose the inclusion of the third context – preparing future teachers to teach academic integrity and ethics – in preservice teacher education. Although the chapter uses the preservice teacher education in Sweden as a starting point, the three ethical contexts that are identified are not limited to any particular national preservice education system but are relevant in other similar frameworks as well.