Negotiating Ethical Practice in Adult Education (review)

This slight volume from the New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education addresses ethical issues in practice. The editor provides a theoretical context for ethical practice and then presents four practitioners' stories and reflections about making ethical decisions in practice. The final chapters present observations on the four stories told and the editor provides practical guidelines for engaging in ethical practice.

The editor and authors acknowledge the fluid, contextual nature of ethical practice and the lack of clarity that can accompany ethical situations. The practice of adult education is similar to the practice of student affairs. The stories show the authors in the roles of external consultant, classroom facilitator, adviser, and administrator, roles student affairs practitioners fill in higher education institutions. The stories reflect diversity of settings and ethical situations. Their work is based on a commitment to social justice and, oftentimes, the practitioners' see their work as social change, another important parallel to student affairs work.

In chapter 1, Anthony Weston, a professor of philosophy, sets the context for ethical decision-making. He suggests that ethical practice is not a choice between right and wrong or choosing and enacting a moral principle. Rather, he provides a framework for ethical practice that acknowledges the multiple tasks of ethical practice or ethical engagement. In chapter 2, Thomas Sork traces the evolution of adult education as a field of practice and the corresponding work in developing ethical standards or guidelines for the field. He chronicles the numerous organizations that have ethical standards and concludes by providing two different models of ethical practice. Although it is clear the adult educators have engaged in the debate about being a profession and the concomitant artifacts of a profession, including a code of ethics, it appears the field has not committed to an ethical code. Sork highlights one way in which the field of adult education is different from the field of student affairs. Ethical practice is an issue of importance to the field of adult education; however, student affairs practice is guided by ethical principles and standards that are promulgated through our professional associations and graduate programs. Further, CAS, used by many institutions and organizations for program development and program review, has a strong emphasis on ethics. Through adoption of student affairs' codes of ethics as well as the widespread use of CAS to guide practice, student affairs may have a comparatively mature ethical context in which practitioners' do their work.

In the next four chapters, the authors use personal narrative to examine ethical situations they encounter in their work. The richness of the chapters comes from the authors reviewing situations, guiding ethical principles, ethical considerations, and how they chose to resolve them. Some of the challenges are inherent in the work and the authors continuously deal with them. In others, the retrospective examination allows the authors to question decisions and to extract principles and standards of good practice that were operating in each situation, and to know how they now understand in a deeper or more complex way.

In chapter 3 Sue Folinsbee examines literacy training in the workplace. The situations she describes examine questions about how to negotiate entry and terms of service when you are an external consultant. The situations may strike a cord for some student affairs practitioners' who are doing work where the needs of the institution [or the person requesting the training] may be different or even in conflict with the needs of the participants. In chapter 4, Talmadge Guy examines what occurs in the classroom when he teaches about issues of race, class and gender. Guy considers situations and questions that confront student affairs practitioners in our work. This chapter is rich in examples of diversity of students' personal identity, perspectives, and experiences; further he examines how they emerge and operate when examining challenging issues. Guy also examines how his own power and marginality interact in the dynamics of the classroom. In this multi-layered story...