Back to Ethical Capability
Why is it important to explicitly teach the Ethical Capability?
The Ethical Capability describes the development of ethical decision making as discrete knowledge, understandings and skills. This means that the content descriptors covering ethical concepts and decision making and actions need to be explicitly taught, the achievement standards need to be used to assess students, and student achievement needs to be reported.
Explicit teaching requires teachers to document specific content descriptors and achievement standards in units/sequences of lessons and to use this as a focus for their teaching. The Ethical Capability curriculum represents a developmental continuum and therefore part of the planning process includes using the continuum to assist in identifying the level of knowledge, understandings and skills that students currently have in this area, and then build upon this learning. Teachers need to deconstruct and sequence teaching to focus on the steps that lead to new knowledge, deeper understandings and the development of more sophisticated skills. Successful ethical capability learning programs include the opportunity for students to apply the content that they have been explicitly taught to ethical issues in different contexts.
Does Ethical Capability need to be offered as a stand-alone subject?
Schools in Victoria have flexibility in determining how a curriculum is implemented. Regardless of the delivery models selected by individual schools (for example, integrated or stand-alone offerings) explicit teaching of the content descriptions needs to occur to progress student learning.
As this is a new curriculum, older students may need to begin their learning at lower levels in order to engage with the knowledge, understandings and skills that will scaffold their learning in the higher levels of the continuum.
Whole-school planning is essential for schools to determine how and when the curriculum is taught.
Some guiding questions to help make this decision include:
- Who is best equipped to explicitly teach the content in a manner that is pedagogically appropriate to the area?
- Are there opportunities to offer coherent learning programs that incorporate and explicitly teach more than one learning area?
- What kind of learning programs will provide the opportunity for students to engage with a wide range of ethical issues and how and when will the skills and knowledge to engage with these issues be developed?
What is the relationship between the Ethical Capability and the Critical and Creative Thinking?
The Critical and Creative Thinking Capability describes knowledge and skills that are essential to developing Ethical Capability. This relates to fostering the ability to analyse, evaluate and construct arguments and to appreciate the role and importance of reasoning in ethical deliberation. For example, using the content descriptions from the Reasoning strand in Critical and Creative Thinking that explore using criteria is integral to engaging with the meaning of ethical concepts.
Why should I read the glossary of terms for the Ethical Capability curriculum?
Teachers and students need to learn the terminology in this new curriculum area. It provides students with the vocabulary to describe their learning and to explain ethical concepts and decision making.
How do you identify an ethical issue?
The curriculum provides the opportunity to examine a range of ethical issues and these can be sourced widely, for example from:
- narratives and other literary forms, print, aural and/or visual
- current affairs
- issues raised across diverse fields such as history, the arts or science
- hypothetical ethical dilemmas constructed specifically for examination of particular problems.
These issues can assist in learning content, and provide opportunities to test ideas and build knowledge of a wide range of examples and points of view relevant to ethical problems.
What is the relationship between Ethical Capability curriculum and learning about world views, religions and philosophical thought?
In Ethical Capability, students are introduced to different religions and world views and a range of relevant philosophers and/or schools of thought. Students develop the capacity to apply this broad understanding to the investigation of ethical problems.
An outline of the key premises of world views and major religions is available from the two locations on the Victorian Curriculum F–10 website: About the Humanities and Learning in Ethical Capability.