Dilema moral na Educação Infantil: generosidade ou justiça?

The aim of this study is to investigate the judgments about the virtue of generosity or justice by teachers in early childhood education and compare their judgments with the children’s judgments about generosity or justice. We interviewed 26 teachers and 90 children aged 4, 5 and 6 years at this level of education. The instrument used was a moral dilemma in which the protagonist of the story would have to choose between giving a prize to the child who drew the most beautiful picture (justice) or to the child who was sad (generosity). The results indicate that justice is the virtue most valued by teachers and that it is already valued by children and may be a need for them. And generosity is valued more by children than by teachers.

Indutores de problematização aplicados a uma aula de antropologia e dilema moral emergente

Este artigo relata uma experiência ocorrida no âmbito do ensino de estudantes do curso de educação social que, após terem realizado uma investigação de cariz antropológica num bairro da cidade do Porto a partir do conceito de “não-lugares” de Marc Augé, continuavam sem “ver” e “reconhecer” os seus habitantes, permanecendo estes sem rosto e nome concretos nas transcrições e nos discursos destes estudantes. O problema da invisibilidade aqui abordado foi trabalhado em sala de aula a partir do modelo teórico da problematização e aplicado, neste caso, aos dilemas morais suscitados no espírito do professor quando se apercebeu da incapacidade dos estudantes em “verem” (= reconhecerem) os habitantes do bairro. O problemático surgiu quando esta experiência demonstrou que a formação humanista dos educadores sociais que se pretende alcançar ao longo do curso ainda não estava assumida. A partir desta constatação, e socorrendo-se do losango de problematização sugerido por Fabre & Musquer (2009), o docente optou por uma abordagem de ensino centrada numa epistemologia moral que realçasse as formas de olhar com indiferença ou eivadas de estereótipos ‘através de outrem’, sem levar em consideração o sujeito no seu estatuto de pessoa. Pretende futuramente retirar dos ferimentos morais (inconscientemente) infligidos pelos estudantes aos habitantes ‘invisíveis’ os princípios morais do conceito de reconhecimento que, para o ser, requer a aprendizagem de uma certa literacia moral, especialmente dos educadores sociais

Teoría de la mente en la esquizofrenia.

Resumen tomado de la publicación

Dilemas morales

Antes del siglo XX la tradición filosófica moral ha reconocido la existencia de los conflictos morales pero ha rechazado la posibilidad de los auténticos dilemas morales. Para poderentender por qué hoy el tema de los dilemas morales ha reclamado para sí tanta atención, es importante ponernos de acuerdo en la definición de algunos conceptos. Un conflicto morales una situación en la que un(a) agente se ve confrontado(a) con dos obligaciones morales que le instan a actuar. Un dilema moral es una situación extrema de conflicto moral en la que nuestro(a) agente no puede seguir un curso de acción que sea conformecon sus dos obligaciones en conflicto. Para que un conflicto moraltenga el carácter de ser un auténtico dilema moral (genuine moral dilemma) y no simplemente un aparente dilema moral (apparent moral dilemma), ninguna de las obligaciones en conflicto es en efecto más fuerte o logra invalidar a la otra obligación. A raíz de un artículo escrito en 1962 por E. J. Lemmon, titulado precisamente "Dilemas morales" (Moral Dilemmas), se abrió un debate entre los filósofos anglosajones contemporáneosacerca de la existencia o no de los auténticos dilemas morales.

The refinement and validation of the critical decision making and problem solving scale moral dilema (CDP-MD)

This thesis extended previous research on critical decision making and problem solving by refining and validating a measure designed to assess the use of critical thinking and critical discussion in sociomoral dilemmas. The purpose of this thesis was twofold: 1) to refine the administration of the Critical Thinking Subscale of the CDP to elicit more adequate responses and for purposes of refining the coding and scoring procedures for the total measure, and 2) to collect preliminary data on the initial reliabilities of the measure. Subjects consisted of 40 undergraduate students at Florida International University. Results indicate that the use of longer probes on the Critical Thinking Subscale was more effective in eliciting adequate responses necessary for coding and evaluating the subjects performance. Analyses on the psychometric properties of the measure consisted of test-retest reliability and inter-rater reliability.

A validação do Teste de Juízo Moral (MJT) para diferentes culturas: o caso brasileiro

The present article deals with the adaptation of the Moral Judgment Test (MJT) for the Portuguese language. The principles of the test, its format and the process of content, construct and criterion validation are presented. In the same way, reliability is discussed using Brazilian research results that produced the necessity of elaborating another dilemma to compose the MJT-xt (extended).

O desenvolvimento sócio-moral no contexto escolar em crianças do ciclo I - ensino fundamental

Pós-graduação em Educação - FFC

Competência de juízo moral dos estudantes de medicina: um estudo piloto

The authors conducted a cross-sectional short-term study using Lind's Moral Judgment Test (MJT) to compare the moral judgment competence (C-score) among students in the first and eighth semesters from a medical school in the Northeast region of Brazil. This study also evaluated the influence of such factors as age and gender on moral competence. A difference equal to or greater than 5.0 points (absolute effect-size) on the C-score was considered significant. A regression of moral judgment competence among the students in their eighth semester in relation to the students in the first semester (C-score: 20.5 and 26.2 points, respectively) was observed. In the analysis of the students' performances in terms of MJT dilemmas, the phenomenon of moral segmentation was observed in both semesters, and the students performed better on the worker's dilemma than on the doctor's dilemma. Among students in the same semester of study, older students had lower C-scores. When comparing performance by gender, there was no significant difference between men's and women's C-scores. The finding of regression or stagnation in moral competence among the medical students demands deep reflection by those who work with the political-pedagogical projects of medical schools and by the entire faculty, in order to seek strategies to reverse this condition.

A contação de histórias como recurso facilitador do desenvolvimento do juízo moral de crianças da educação infantil

Pós-graduação em Docência para a Educação Básica - FC

Negotiating social and moral order in internet relay chat

Although internet chat is a significant aspect of many internet users’ lives, the manner in which participants in quasi-synchronous chat situations orient to issues of social and moral order remains to be studied in depth. The research presented here is therefore at the forefront of a continually developing area of study. This work contributes new insights into how members construct and make accountable the social and moral orders of an adult-oriented Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel by addressing three questions: (1) What conversational resources do participants use in addressing matters of social and moral order? (2) How are these conversational resources deployed within IRC interaction? and (3) What interactional work is locally accomplished through use of these resources? A survey of the literature reveals considerable research in the field of computer-mediated communication, exploring both asynchronous and quasi-synchronous discussion forums. The research discussed represents a range of communication interests including group and collaborative interaction, the linguistic construction of social identity, and the linguistic features of online interaction. It is suggested that the present research differs from previous studies in three ways: (1) it focuses on the interaction itself, rather than the ways in which the medium affects the interaction; (2) it offers turn-by-turn analysis of interaction in situ; and (3) it discusses membership categories only insofar as they are shown to be relevant by participants through their talk. Through consideration of the literature, the present study is firmly situated within the broader computer-mediated communication field. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis were adopted as appropriate methodological approaches to explore the research focus on interaction in situ, and in particular to investigate the ways in which participants negotiate and co-construct social and moral orders in the course of their interaction. IRC logs collected from one chat room were analysed using a two-pass method, based on a modification of the approaches proposed by Pomerantz and Fehr (1997) and ten Have (1999). From this detailed examination of the data corpus three interaction topics are identified by means of which participants clearly orient to issues of social and moral order: challenges to rule violations, ‘trolling’ for cybersex, and experiences regarding the 9/11 attacks. Instances of these interactional topics are subjected to fine-grained analysis, to demonstrate the ways in which participants draw upon various interactional resources in their negotiation and construction of channel social and moral orders. While these analytical topics stand alone in individual focus, together they illustrate different instances in which participants’ talk serves to negotiate social and moral orders or collaboratively construct new orders. Building on the work of Vallis (2001), Chapter 5 illustrates three ways that rule violation is initiated as a channel discussion topic: (1) through a visible violation in open channel, (2) through an official warning or sanction by a channel operator regarding the violation, and (3) through a complaint or announcement of a rule violation by a non-channel operator participant. Once the topic has been initiated, it is shown to become available as a topic for others, including the perceived violator. The fine-grained analysis of challenges to rule violations ultimately demonstrates that channel participants orient to the rules as a resource in developing categorizations of both the rule violation and violator. These categorizations are contextual in that they are locally based and understood within specific contexts and practices. Thus, it is shown that compliance with rules and an orientation to rule violations as inappropriate within the social and moral orders of the channel serves two purposes: (1) to orient the speaker as a group member, and (2) to reinforce the social and moral orders of the group. Chapter 6 explores a particular type of rule violation, solicitations for ‘cybersex’ known in IRC parlance as ‘trolling’. In responding to trolling violations participants are demonstrated to use affiliative and aggressive humour, in particular irony, sarcasm and insults. These conversational resources perform solidarity building within the group, positioning non-Troll respondents as compliant group members. This solidarity work is shown to have three outcomes: (1) consensus building, (2) collaborative construction of group membership, and (3) the continued construction and negotiation of existing social and moral orders. Chapter 7, the final data analysis chapter, offers insight into how participants, in discussing the events of 9/11 on the actual day, collaboratively constructed new social and moral orders, while orienting to issues of appropriate and reasonable emotional responses. This analysis demonstrates how participants go about ‘doing being ordinary’ (Sacks, 1992b) in formulating their ‘first thoughts’ (Jefferson, 2004). Through sharing their initial impressions of the event, participants perform support work within the interaction, in essence working to normalize both the event and their initial misinterpretation of it. Normalising as a support work mechanism is also shown in relation to participants constructing the ‘quiet’ following the event as unusual. Normalising is accomplished by reference to the indexical ‘it’ and location formulations, which participants use both to negotiate who can claim to experience the ‘unnatural quiet’ and to identify the extent of the quiet. Through their talk participants upgrade the quiet from something legitimately experienced by one person in a particular place to something that could be experienced ‘anywhere’, moving the phenomenon from local to global provenance. With its methodological design and detailed analysis and findings, this research contributes to existing knowledge in four ways. First, it shows how rules are used by participants as a resource in negotiating and constructing social and moral orders. Second, it demonstrates that irony, sarcasm and insults are three devices of humour which can be used to perform solidarity work and reinforce existing social and moral orders. Third, it demonstrates how new social and moral orders are collaboratively constructed in relation to extraordinary events, which serve to frame the event and evoke reasonable responses for participants. And last, the detailed analysis and findings further support the use of conversation analysis and membership categorization as valuable methods for approaching quasi-synchronous computer-mediated communication.

"Well, now I'm upset": Moral and social orders in the playground

There is much still to learn about how young children’s membership with peers shapes their constructions of moral and social obligations within everyday activities in the school playground. This paper investigates how a small group of girls, aged four to six years, account for their everyday social interactions in the playground. They were video-recorded as they participated in a pretend game of school. Several days later, a video-recorded excerpt of the interaction was shown to them and invited to comment on what was happening in the video. This conversation was audio-recorded. Drawing on a conversation analysis approach, this chapter shows that, despite their discontent and complaining about playing the game of school, the girls’ actions showed their continued orientation to the particular codes of the game, of ‘no going away’ and ‘no telling’. By making relevant these codes, jointly constructed by the girls during the interview, they managed each other’s continued participation within two arenas of action: the pretend, as a player in a pretend game of school; and the real, as a classroom member of a peer group. Through inferences to explicit and implicit codes of conduct, moral obligations were invoked as the girls attempted to socially exclude or build alliances with others, and enforce their own social position. As well, a shared history that the girls re-constructed has moral implications for present and future relationships. The girls oriented to the history as an interactional resource for accounting for their actions in the pretend game. This paper uncovers how children both participate in, and shape, their everyday social worlds through talk and interaction and the consequences a taken-for-granted activity such as playing school has for their moral and social positions in the peer group.

Free will, moral responsibility and ADHD

One of the oldest problems in philosophy concerns the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. If we adopt the position that we lack free will, in the absolute sense—as have most philosophers who have addressed this issue—how can we truly be held accountable for what we do? This paper will contend that the most significant and interesting challenge to the long-standing status-quo on the matter comes not from philosophy, jurisprudence, or even physics, but rather from psychology. By examining this debate through the lens of contemporary behaviour disorders, such as ADHD, it will be argued that notions of free will, along with its correlate, moral responsibility, are being eroded through the logic of psychology which is steadily reconfiguring large swathes of familiar human conduct as pathology. The intention of the paper is not only to raise some concerns over the exponential growth of behaviour disorders, but also, and more significantly, to flag the ongoing relevance of philosophy for prying open contemporary educational problems in new and interesting ways.

Free will, moral responsibility and ADHD

One of the oldest problems in philosophy concerns the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. If we adopt the position that we lack free will, in the absolute sense—as have most philosophers who have addressed this issue—how can we truly be held accountable for what we do? This paper will contend that the most significant and interesting challenge to the long-standing status-quo on the matter comes not from philosophy, jurisprudence, or even physics, but rather from psychology. By examining this debate through the lens of contemporary behaviour disorders, such as ADHD, it will be argued that notions of free will, along with its correlate, moral responsibility, are being eroded through the logic of psychology which is steadily reconfiguring large swathes of familiar human conduct as pathology. The intention of the paper is not only to raise some concerns over the exponential growth of behaviour disorders, but also, and more significantly, to flag the ongoing relevance of philosophy for prying open contemporary educational problems in new and interesting ways.