Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Both international and local authors argue strongly that state education systems have an important role to play in the development and nurturing of positive values and attitudes in learners. In some instances, as is the case in South Africa, the education system may even prescribe the values that ought to be taught in the institutions of learning. While I agree that education institutions have a responsibility to teach positive values to learners, it is my contention that it is unlikely that educators will be able to fulfil this role in any meaningful way, without an informed understanding of how to reconcile the tensions between personal and common values, the nature of values knowledge and the complexities and challenges that surround the teaching and assessment of values. This study begins to explore some of these complexities by addressing the historical events, education initiatives and policy decisions that have informed and shaped values education policies in South Africa. I conclude that while the inclusion of values in the curriculum is a commendable education initiative to root democratic values in society, it must be acknowledged that values education inevitably, has a political role to fulfil. The teaching of values knowledge cannot be limited to behaviourist approaches. Learners deserve an education that offers opportunities to them to develop into responsible, caring and morally just citizens. A central aim of values education should thus be to provide learners with opportunities and tools to construct meaning around moral concepts and positive values. I strongly believe that it is unlikely that this will occur if educators are not appropriately capacitated to provide such opportunities to their learners. / South Africa

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Local and international pundits concur that education systems play a pivotal role in fostering and developing values in learners. In some countries, like South Africa, the values and rights enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights resonate in the Schools Act. As one of the concerns of education is nationbuilding, my study investigates if the integration of the values does achieve tolerance and co-operation in the classroom by examining how learners make sense of values in the Mathematical Literacy curriculum. While I firmly believe that educational institutions have a responsibility to integrate positive values into all aspects of the school curriculum, it is my contention that learners cannot fully benefit from values specifically related to the Mathematical Literacy curriculum itself on their own. All stakeholders in education need to come together to establish an informed understanding of policy documents and reconcile the complexities and challenges that surround the transmission of values, so that educators will be able to assist learners in a meaningful way. The classroom life of a learner is intricately woven with that of the teacher. In order to unearth the views and practices of learners and teachers, I adopted a participatory approach. The qualitative study that ensued was conducted in three Mathematics Literacy classrooms at secondary schools in Cape Town, South Africa. The observation sessions afforded me the opportunity to experience and appreciate how the teachers integrate values into the Mathematical Literacy lessons while observing learners‟ behaviour in the classroom. The interactions and interviews with both learners and teachers aided in further unravelling their understanding and implementation of values in the Mathematical Literacy lessons. For learners to develop into responsible, caring and morally just citizens who arecapable of critical thought, they equire an education that provides them with the necessary opportunities and tools to develop. Mathematical Literacy is able to provide learners with the relevant opportunities and thinking tools to construct meaning around moral concepts. I strongly believe that for learners to accomplish this goal, educators need to be appropriately capacitated to facilitate opportunities for their learners.I did not find any evidence in the literature that suggests a fail-safe theoretical approach to success in values education. I am of the opinion that for any measure of success in values education, a combination of these theories of learning and moral development has to be employed. / South Africa

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The world wars in the 20th century did not only influence the Swedish society, but also the Swedish school system and its reforms. The focus was now to foster the pupils to become democratic citizens, that are sympathetic, tolerant and exhibit solidarity with their fellow human beings. The aim of this qualitative text analysis and systematic literature study is to analyze and compile how norms and values took their form in three different Swedish school reforms, from a historic and contemporary perspective. With peer-reviewed scientifical studies, we gain an understanding of challenges and solutions, in the application of these norms and values in the daily school activities. The study is a compilation of reviewed encyclopedias, literature and laws. Findings show that norms and values in the Swedish school reforms have changed drastically, especifically between 1955 and 2011. The current norms and values came to pass in 1994 and remains unchanged until now. These reforms are emphasized in a distinct and nuanced chapter. There appears to be a general lack of training and qualification in this field. This lack of competence among teachers makes it harder for them to handle situations where the norms and values are being challenged. Teachers face difficulty in using the right meta-language in transferring the new norms and values to the pupils. Therefore, it is of paramount importance that educators are adequately trained in this field, to be able to tackle myriads of valuechallenging situations and to have a more authentic open classroom where all pupils' voices are heard, thereby, promoting democracy and human rights within Swedish educational institutions.

Character education has been a part of public schooling in the United States since its beginning. It has undergone dramatic changes over the years, from didactic instruction to service learning; it continues to evolve as more and more schools become involved in teaching students right from wrong. The current emphasis on character education in schools began in the early 1990s as an attempt to alleviate the increasingly violent behavior of students as reported in the media. The purpose of this study was to determine how character education affected the behavior of students. The study involved: observing student behavior; interviewing teachers, students, and parents to determine their perceptions of the effects of the character education program on student behavior; and reviewing disciplinary records to identify behavioral patterns. The findings from this study suggested that character education programs may have a positive effect on student behavior. Furthermore, the findings led to recommendations regarding the implementation of character education programs in elementary schools. Character education should be an integral part of the curriculum, not taught as a separate subject. This includes not only academic subjects but also specialty areas such as art, music, and physical education. Classroom rules should be based on the principles of good character and teachers should model good character for the students to observe. Additionally, students should be taught character through hands-on service activities that contribute to the school, the community, and society in general. This will help the students develop a sense of ownership of the program and should help to improve student behavior.

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of children committing extreme acts of violence prompting many schools to adopt and implement character education programs. Character education has been defined as educating students to understand, act upon, and care about universal virtues like respect, truthfulness, responsibility, and caring. There are many character education programs available from which a school's staff can choose. The LIFESKILLS and Lifelong Guidelines program is one that focuses on producing a caring community of responsible citizens for life. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to evaluate the perceptions of students, teachers, and parents regarding the value of a character education program that was implemented in 2003 at a public elementary school located in a small urban area in East Tennessee. In order to gather data, teachers and students participated in one-on-one interviews and parents completed openended surveys. The findings from this study suggested that the LIFESKILLS and Lifelong Guidelines program has had a positive effect on the school participating in the study. Students explained that the program has helped them and that they use the LIFESKILLS and Lifelong Guidelines at home and school. Teachers perceived the program to be a beneficial addition to the school’s curriculum. Parents perceived the program as valuable and reported their children discussing the LIFESKILLS and Lifelong Guidelines at home. The teacher and parent participants gave several 3 suggestions for improving the program including: further staff development, additional information being sent to parents, and meeting the goal of having consistent use and implementation of the program on a school-wide basis.

Syftet med detta arbete har varit att besvara frågeställningen: Hur kan en som lärare arbeta systematiskt med värdegrundsarbete under SO-lektionerna. Denna forskningsöversikt är riktad till lärarstudenter och verksamma lärare, främst inom SO-ämnena men kan vara till nytta för andra verksamma lärare och lärarstudenter som vill veta mer om hur en kan arbeta systematiskt med värdegrundsfrågor. Arbetet är baserat på en forskningsöversikt för att utreda frågeställningen. Vi har sökt på olika databaser och läst olika vetenskapliga texter både från Sverige och andra nationer. Forskning visar tydligt att det är av vikt att arbeta med värdegrundsfrågor redan från tidig ålder men att det kan vara svårt att få in i det dagliga arbetet. Att arbeta med värdegrundsfrågor ingår i det demokratiska uppdrag som skolan vilar på, det handlar om att utbilda goda demokratiska medborgare. Forskningsöversikten visar också på olika metoder som lärare kan använda sig utav när de ska utveckla ett systematiskt värdegrundsarbete.

Our study is about values education and the teachers’ work with it. The purpose with the study have been to develop our knowledge about schools’ work with values education, but also get an insight in differences and similarities among teachers. We have figured out how teachers can work with values and how this work can be connected with identity. A big part of the students’ identity is created during their childhood and time in school and the teachers’ job is to give those students the right tools to develop both emotionally and in terms of knowledge. By performing interviews we have been able to construct a basis for discussion about the teachers’ work with values education connected to previous research and theory such as Erik Homburger Eriksons concepts about values and identity. Our study shows that teachers’ values education is largely integrated into the basic education plan. The teachers use tools such as media and values exercises but the most important thing is the communication between teacher and student. Both the teachers and students are supposed to be role models for each other and in the classroom an open and forgiving basis for discussion is of importance. Students’ creation of identity and values education goes hand in hand. Through the work with values students’ identities are developed

In educational research, the concept of school climate has been linked to quality teaching, teacher-pupil relations, and explicit values education, among others. In Sweden, despite showing positive teacher-pupil relations, critiques towards classroom management and a lack of teacher authority, which affect its school climate, have been made. This research aims to compare different teacher-pupil authority relations and their influence on the transmission of the hidden curriculum in Sweden. The study is going to be framed within the perspectives, definition, and current research on the hidden curriculum transmission and Wrong’s types of authority applied to classroom contexts. Non-participatory observations were conducted in a municipal school, an independent school, and an international school located in Sweden to collect data for this research. These observations take place within two Grade 9 classrooms of grundskola, and a Grade 3 classroom of gymnasieskolan. Maribel Blasco’s operationalisation of the hidden curriculum is adapted to classroom contexts to conduct the observations. Findings were described and compared considering the author’s ontology and epistemology, the operationalisation of the hidden curriculum, and the theoretical framework that guided this research. The findings of this research relate to the implicit transmission of values through authority responses, the teacher’s classroom management strategies and teaching style, their consistency and coherence in the application of classroom rules, and the implicit transmission of messages through pedagogical strategies. The researcher outlines the implications that this study has for teacher training programmes in Sweden. The direction of further research is also delimited.

This thesis presents a model of institutional values transmission through cross-case analysis of values education undertaken in three UK secondary schools. Since the early 1980s a significant amount of research has been carried out on cultural transmission and the transmission of values, though it has focused on intergenerational transmission within families and the interaction between the school and the family in terms of converging and diverging values and worldviews. Very little work has been done on the process of transmission of values in schools or other organisations that is evidence-based. An increasing number of governments and organisations, as well as schools, are beginning to invest seriously in values education programmes, but whether the idea of values education is theoretically coherent is still disputed. Through an evaluation of the philosophical, psychological and sociological literature on values and employing phenomenological and semiotic analyses, a theory of values as transmissible entities is developed, which is then extended to a general concept of values transmission using the twin terms invocation and evocation, to denote modes of bringing value concepts to the awareness of an audience and of generating group cohesion through a shared experience linked to particular values, respectively, these terms themselves emerging from the theory of values. Through data collection, analysis and modelling of values education in three schools – a state comprehensive, a faith school and an independent – a plausible mechanism for institutional values transmission is developed. This mechanism integrates two partial models: a permeation-authority inculcation model of transmission flow with a resistance-transformation model of moral autonomy. At its heart it envisages a systemically robust cycle of institutional values discourse, institutional cultural expectations and the generation of a sense of community shored up by individual commitment. A two tier qualitative approach is used in this research, having both an inductive, theory generating phase of field research, data capture and analysis, and a deductive, hypothesis-led confirmatory phase. The inductive phase uses a case study format and cross-case analysis, providing data for analysis and for testing a set of hypotheses in the deductive phase. The development of a mechanism for institutional values transmission is carried out using an institutional model of the schools as a data collection and analytical instrument, based on three structural aspects: an authority hierarchy; an interiority/exteriority duality in the institutional lived-experience; and a system hierarchy. Multiple data collection and analytic methods are employed in each case study, in order to build up a ‘three-dimensional’ picture of the transmission of values in each school. Both comparative and iterative cross-case analyses are carried out. The findings emerging from the case studies suggest the following tentative conclusions: schools have varying degrees of awareness of the values that they impart, although all consider values education to be an important part of what they do and to impact on student performance and behaviour; while there is some explicit values-oriented pedagogy, most teaching of values is implicit; schools with greater ethnic diversity have more challenges to build a cohesive community, as this is at odds with the ‘spontaneous sociality’ of the pupils; there is a broad convergence on the same values found most widely distributed throughout schools across the widest range possible with respect to forms of governance, educational philosophy and demography. The findings carry a number of pedagogical implications: general support is found for explicit values education programmes and the linking between behavioural standards and academic achievement; the importance of the development of a ‘moral community’ around the ethos of the school and the creation of opportunities for multiple belonging is highlighted; and resistance to institutional authority structures is explored for its significant potential for transformation to an acceptance of institutional values.