When we say about education we mean a long and interesting practice – process of understanding the importance of new knowledge , new for you but well-known for many those interested considering it to be a real treasure. Everything on the Earth being stable and reliable has begun as a new knowledge, a stimulus and a motive for a progress and development. In the head of the process there has been A Teacher, as a forerunner of a success in learning, whose destiny was to learn universal wisdom and to teach it, in order to reach achievement in self-realization and improving the world, not less. During the years the generations of teachers could see teaching became a leading profession among the others in its medieval and modern sense.
The first Workshop on Ethics Education may be called a teacher’s Personality itself in ideal sense, suitable for all epochs, nations and languages. It is because teaching reflects social changes, changing conditions, society’s troubles and peoples’ losses and findings. A teacher is a professional who has been learning for the whole life in order to brighten the very idea – it is a great time and honor to be a teacher. Ethics as a code of the best personal traits, characteristics and features is a corner stone of a profession. Ethics does possible organizing a suitable educational sphere for students of all levels of intellectual development and psychological readiness to overcome difficulties of learning.
The important part of educational sphere is classroom, where the teacher in communication and cooperation with students writes down the results of findings, losses, discoveries, - knowledge, not only on discipline, but on science of a subject and on a human.
Ethics supposes that a teacher has a responsibility to act to improve things. To do it a teacher must know, recognize, be sure, - what does it mean- improvement things? First it means constant and prolonged improvement teacher’s professional skills not only on subjects that interest him/her, but a wide range of them. Only due to such approach a teacher has opportunity of taking control of profession in its developing, changing and innovating. One of the most difficult task of professional personal estimation is recognizing and understanding a personal role in encouraging the students and other teachers to take progressive stands on the issues of new competences necessary for future professionals in all spheres of a society. It is like that because a teacher joined a profession devoted to true service- to make the world better, or, as we used to say at present- to build a sustainable development world.
The essential core of the practical teacher’s Workshop on Ethic Education is devoting life to maintaining the eternal values as the heritage of cultural ideas and values. Culture of learning, culture of understanding, culture of sharing the ideas, culture of maintaining the valuable findings in science and practice, culture of communication in a team of those oriented to personal mental and social surviving and developing in the changing world.
The scientists all over the world has been working for years in the sphere of “spiritual education of personality of future social worker”. A teacher becomes a true social worker having penetrated through Social Work Department and socially-humanitarian disciplines, based on 5 principles [1, c.12]. They are:
- Principle of humanism which provides joint creativity and mutual relations between a teacher and a student. This principle includes the main value of it as: interests, needs, opportunities, peculiarities, internal light. Under internal light it is understood honesty, kindness, true, concern, mercy, reliability as a main human’s personal characteristics.
- Principle of culture confirmation.
- Principle of personal functioning which provides that in many cases spiritual education depends on a teacher, a tutor and conditions of his activity.
- We pay attention to definition “creative person” as a unique concept, having attention to spirituality, motivation, reflex, orientation, critics, transformations, self-realization and creation.
- Principle of belief of a tutor in the kind beginning of each student helps his realization. (All tutors’ failures – in absence of love and lower self-estimation).
- Principle of teamwork of a teacher with a student provides involving the student into study and self-improvement for the sake of promotion to the purpose appointed.
Summarizing all these principles explains the destination of a prolonged movement of a team-group of learned and taught to purposes of professional and moral training. “The way to success is always under construction” - is a wisdom for this unity on their way to intellectual culture, moral culture, national culture, ecological culture, culture of dialogue, and legal, political, family-household and art-aesthetic culture.
Summarizing all these items gives us presence of social services, humanism and democracy, necessary for development of students’ independent readiness for practical activities in chosen area of professional embodiment in future.
Saying about learning process and guidelines as a whole, we mean such main aspects of it as: motivation, action-reflection, exploration plus dialogue comes to discovery. The task of a teacher to stimulate the students curiosity about the topic supposed, challenge the students’ perceptions and motivate them to explore ethical issues. It is important to understand the very ethical issues because they are closely connected with four stages of the” way of understanding with the way of creativity”. At the stage of exploration the participants (students) of Workshop of Ethics Education (an intellectual and artistically attractive area of daily educational process) explore ideas and gain new experiences through practical exercises. Dialogue is central in the learning process. It must be organized maximally talented by a teacher interested deeply in high motivation and interest, productivity and reliability of the students’ ideas born in a dialogue. Discovery is a fruit of common work- sharing the main outcomes of a group discussion, a new experience. In the process of reflection the students try to find connection with oneself. The main ideas of an action are: a) to unite participants; b) to involve them in the process of getting knowledge as happily gaining it; c) help the students to recognize necessity of the process of getting knowledge with their own reality. Only such approach may inspire students to identify an appropriate action and require mutual understanding of the subject, discipline, the others, personal place and duty (as responsibility!) in active team work.
Ethics education is an educational means in intercultural and interfaith learning. Respect, empathy and responsibility. Responsibility unites the main aspects of valuable life. The students get opportunity of analyzing their own roles in their family, school, University group, etc., in order to imagine their viewpoints and experiences among the representatives of society from their own perspectives, honestly estimated by them. It helps the students to understand and adopt the individual and collective responsibilities they hold as citizens [2, p. 253]. What does it mean? The students like this phrase and support it during the studies on ethics values in education:
“It is interesting always and sometimes very hard to put oneself in others ’shoes”. The teachers defined among the others one extremely significant rule: the values should not be compartmentalized, but interconnected. The students were proposed to choose among the phrases about “A teacher as A Friend” some more expressive and deep to describe the situation of learning-teaching communication from the position of resultative success. The same phrases with the same problem key-question were given to teachers. The results have demonstrated a unity of understanding the necessity of unity through ethics approach and ethical realization of educational process. Some of the ideas to be valued and estimated were like these: “A friend is someone who understands your past, believe in your future, and accepts you just the way you are.”; “A friend is someone who helps you up when you are down, and if they can’t, they lay down beside you and listen.”; “A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the word.”; “Friends are god’s way of apologizing to us for our families.”; “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another:” What? You too? I thought I was the only one.:; “Friends are those rare people who ask how we are and then wait to hear the answer.”; “A friend is a hand that is always holding yours, no matter how close or far apart you may be. A friend is someone who is always there and will always, always care. A friend is a feeling of forever in the heart.”; “A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.”; “You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can’t forget. Those are your friends.”
Ethics education reflects on different cultures, ways of thinking, faiths traditions and ideas. It comes from intercultural and interfaith perspective “not to leave our future behind.” It helps people open up to others, better respond to the needs of their immediate environment [3, p. 26]. The better education is? The better is the world on it’s way to a sustainable development.
