As my inquiry will involve a number of students some of which will be minors there are many ethical issues I will have to take into consideration. Namely the information that the students give me will have to be handled sensitively, in particular any personal information ensuring that confidential information remains confident and the students, parents and teachers are aware of what information will be published. Another issue that has been bothering me for a while is how it will be best for me to contact the students, in particular the students from my current school when they go off to different colleges. As I have mentioned before by law a teacher should not have any personal contact with previous students until they have been out of the school for at least two years. I really don’t want to put myself in a position where by my professional behaviour could be scrutinised thus I approached the art director with this issue. He suggested that I use email as my only form of communication, make sure that you don’t give any students my mobile phone number and ensure that I cc him and the student’s current art teacher into all of the emails. Also I must ensure that I have parental consent before I have any contact with the students outside of school. I think when dealing with minors one has to take a deontological approach to ethics. A set of rules must be established with no gray areas. It is either allowed or not. This is not the usual approach I would take to ethical issues in most cases I would consider myself a virtue ethicist. Believing that things are not black and white, the situation and the person’s character should be taken into account but sometimes subjectivity leads to confusion which you cannot have when dealing with minors and other vulnerable groups.
Obviously before involving the students into any part of my inquiry I will have to get parental consent, I am slightly concerned about the possible parental involvement clearly they have the right to say they don’t want their children to answer certain question and know what information I am going to publish about their child but I really don’t want them getting too involved constantly peering over mine and their child’s shoulder censoring what they write and thus making the information I receive from them not as useful as it possibly could be. Again this is an issue that I have brought up with the art director as I didn’t really know how to approach this. His reply was there is not much I can do, if the parents decide that they want to be involved and check everything that is written then there is nothing I can do about it, I will just have to take this into account when analysing the information gathered. The only thing I can do to try and stop them from getting so involved is to give them no reason to feel like they need to be. Conduct myself and any interviews in a very professional way, be confident in what I am doing and ensue that I have an answer for every possible question that they might come up with. He suggested that if they feel confident and comfortable with me then they will not feel the need to scrutinise my every step.
When I was looking into the ethical issues raised in the practice of art the main one was the materials used to create the piece. I listed some examples of occasions when materials have been used I what was considered an unethical way. This inquiry proposes to look into the use of materials and encourage active experimentation of materials in GCSE students and A-level. It is the reasonability of the educator to make them aware of the ethical issues behind using certain materials but as I will be looking into how they experiment with materials and processes in their work I will also ensure that they are aware of these facts. All of the ‘unethical’ materials mentioned in my previous blog will be out of the question for these students, not only because of the ethical implication but because school policy will not allow it, but they should be aware that these sort of issues should be taken into consideration when making their work to and extent now but more so later on in their artistic career.
The aim of this inquiry is to try and improve the teaching of art at GCSE and A-level. In order to improve it one must first identify the problems. When doing this I am going to have to be very careful not to offend any of the art teachers that I will be working with. At no point do I want them to think that I am criticising their teaching styles because who am I to tell them that they are doing something wrong? I am not a teacher, I am not even a graduate yet, I am merely an observer and I will have to remember that is very easy to pick up on faults or areas for improvement when you do not actually have to do it. To overcome this problem I am going to try and be as involved as possible in the department I am going to investigate become involved in the classes and understand their dynamics so that if there are any criticism they know that they are well founded. I will also try to keep any areas for improvement very general, so that the comments do not appear to be aimed directly at any one teacher or department.
Through doing this section of the module I have realised that there are many more ethical issues to be taken into consideration then I ever though. I was aware that dealing with children is an ethical mind field, but I was not aware of all the other issues. I am confident that there are still many more that I have not taken into consideration so if you read this and think of any very important ones I have missed please let me know. I am also planning on scanning our schools child safe guarding document and up loading it as a pdf file obviously I will have to remove any sensitive information and details of the school but it might be useful for some of the other teachers who are not quite so familiar with safeguarding policies. Most of them are pretty standard for all schools. I will let you know where and when I have managed to upload it.
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