Values education refers to the aspect of the educational practice which entails that moral or political values as well as norms, dispositions and skills grounded in those values are mediated to or developed among students.
Values education can be referred to as explicit or implicit. Whereas explicit values education refers to schools’ official curriculum of what and how to teach values and morality, including teachers’ explicit intentions and practices of values education, implicit values education is associated with a hidden curriculum and implicit values influence, embedded in school and classroom practices. Teaching is inevitably a moral activity in which teachers have to consider the ethical complexity of teaching and the moral impact they have on their students.
We are particularly interested in examining values and moral influence in everyday school life, teachers’ main concerns and definitions of their practices of values education, teacher ethics, the morality of school rules, and how children and adolescents reason, act, and interact in moral terms. Among other things we have studied how school rules work in primary school and children’s perspectives of and experiences of democracy and participation in school. In an international project, we have studied Swedish and Turkish teachers’ views on values education.
