Moral Courage of Students Qualifying to Teach in Special Education

Abstract

A large body of research has discussed the issue of moral courage, but there is a lack of research on students who are qualifying to teach in special education. Moral courage is considered as the bridge between talking about values and actually implementing them. Ten special education students in their last year of studies in a large college in Israel participated in the research. Most of the student teachers chose special education for personal or family-related reasons. Data were collected with qualitative research tools: portfolios, field diaries, and partially-structured interviews and analyzed by qualitative research methods, identifying in the students’ stories themes, which were divided into categories. Two kinds of courage were described; courage as a part of the teaching process, when the students independently decided to teach differently from how they were expected to teach, and courage in an exceptional act in which they intervened for the sake of one single child. In every case the students were aware of the fact that they risked their professional future, their “good name” and their studies in the college. Several motives were identified for their behavior: ideological motives, altruism and caring, moral inner motive and responsibility for others, personal reasons that were connected to their own past history, and the existence of support from college instructors.