"In this book, Larry Nucci has combined a rigorous approach to theory and research on social and moral development with great sensitivity to practices in classrooms and schools. This is one of those rare works that intelligently moves between the worlds of research and educational practice."

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Educare il pensiero morale (Italian language edition)
Moral på skemaet : om at undervise børn i moralske spørgsmål (Danish language edition)
La dimensión moral en la educación (Spanish language edition)

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The Culture of Morality: Social Development, Context, and Conflict.
Elliot Turiel. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-5218-0833-2.

"William Bennett had better beware! The claim that Bennett and other neoconservatives have made so much of--that America is in moral decline--has attracted a relentless new critic. Challenging the key terms in this widely accepted claim, Turiel argues that an authentic morality not only can survive breaks with communal traditions but often demands such ruptures. Among civil rights leaders of the 1960s and among Arab feminists today, Turiel finds exemplars of pioneers who risk conflict to end cultural practices that lend to oppression the name of morality. Likewise, in the widespread refusal of contemporary Americans to accept inherited patterns for family and personal life, Turiel sees not the selfishness and narcissism lamented by Bennett and his allies but rather a laudable new willingness to consider fresh possibilities for individual autonomy and for social justice. Those who condemn America for its moral decadence--in Turiel's view--simply fail to realize that societies, just like individuals, mature in their moral perspectives. Sure to provoke spirited rejoinders in the ongoing debate over the nation's cultural health."

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Learning to Trust: Transforming Difficult Elementary Classrooms Through Developmental Discipline.
Marilyn Watson, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. ISBN 0-7879-6650-9.

Marilyn Watson as co-founder of the Developmental Studies Project was instrumental to the creation of what has become known as Developmental Discipline. This approach to managing classrooms takes the process of classroom management from the shadows of “crowd control” into the core processes of children’s social and moral development. As such, it is an approach that asks more of the teacher as it gives back enormous dividends to students and teachers alike. In this book, Watson illustrates the process of developmental discipline through one inner-city teacher’s work with her classroom. This is a terrific book for pre-service and in-service teachers that we now assign as a regular part of the UIC teacher education program. I highly recommend it.

-Larry Nucci
 

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Race-ing Moral Formation: African American Perspectives on Care and Justice.
Vanessa Siddle Walker and John R. Snarey, New York: Teachers College Press, 2004.

Race-ing Moral Formation makes an extraordinary contribution. With historical and developmental sensitivity, this exceptional volume provides a rich analysis of race and moral behavior in everyday experience.

-Margaret Beale Spencer

Ground-breaking and riveting, this is an essential book for any course on moral development and moral education that seeks to explore a major lacuna in moral psychology -- the intersection of race and moral formation.

-Andrew Garrod
 

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The Promotion of Social Awareness.
Robert L. Selman. Russell Sage Foundation, 2003. ISBN 0-87154-757-0, 325 pages.

In this wise and humane book, Robert Selman integrates the insights that he has gained during his thirty-year career as a distinguished clinician and developmental psychologist.….He offers the reader valuable methods for promoting growth in teachers as well as children; and just as importantly, he puts practical methods in the context of a systematic theoretical framework, drawn from the best psychological tradition….The book is a charter for a truly developmental approach to addressing the social-emotional needs of today’s young….

-William Damon
 

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In this collection of essential essays, Nel Noddings examines alternatives to prevailing models of character education-a sympathetic approach based on an ethic of care. Covering both stories in the classroom and controversial issues in education, Noddings describes the similarities and differences between character education and care ethics… examines how moral education may be infused throughout the curriculum…and calls for greater cooperation across fields and more attention to the practical problems of everyday teaching.

-From book jacket
 

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Teaching in Moral and Democratic Education.
Wiel Veugelers and Fritz K. Oser (Eds.), New York, Oxford, 2003. ISBN 0-8204-6861-4, 216 pages.

The task of education, and in particular the role of teachers, is seen as crucial in preparing young people for society. The authors of this volume argue for a critical democratic citizenship in which students combine autonomy and critical thinking with justice and social care. The contributors to this volume are leading researchers in the field of moral and democratic education and they all combine profound theoretical foundations with empirical research that can help practitioners in their pedagogical actions.

-Peter Lang AG European Academic Publishers
 

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This book brings together scholars and researchers from the two main perspectives on values education. On the one hand are the character educators, who define morality in terms of norms, and moral development as the inculcation of moral habits and standards. On the other hand are the developmentalists, who view moral action as the product of moral judgment structured by the person's underlying concepts of justice and human welfare. The construction of these concepts is fostered by education emphasizing reflection, perspective taking, conflict resolution, and autonomous choice. The book moves discussion of these two perspectives beyond the simple reiteration of old positions by presenting new constructs and research that can serve as the basis for an informed approach to moral education.

Contributors include: Kevin Ryan (Chap 1), Edward Wynne (Chap 2), Herbert Walberg & Wynne (Chap 3), Watson, Solomon, Battistich, Schaps & Solomon (Chap 4), Dwight Boyd (Chap 5), Clark Power, A. Higgins & L. Kohlberg (Chap 6), Nona Lyons (Chap 7), Elliot Turiel (Chap 8), Larry Nucci (Chap 9).

For more information contact Larry Nucci, lnucci@uic.edu
 

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This highly readable book gives an account of both racism and race as essentially moral concepts. "Racism" and "racist" have become the central, and often the only, terms used to castigate behavior and attitude in the racial domain of life. Yet few stop to ask exactly what "racism" means. The resulting confusion contributes to an educational stalemate in which persons of different races find it increasingly difficult to have productive exchanges on racial matters. Blum's book offers an account of "racism" as well as a broadening of the moral and evaluative vocabulary used to describe racial ills-racial insensitivity, racial ignorance, racial injustice, racial anxiety. "With an impressive combination of moral acuteness, precision of reasoning, and empirical knowledge…Blum's book makes a major contribution toward a type of politics that rejects mere epithets and slogans in favor of thoughtful deliberation." Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics, University of Chicago. "I'm Not a Racist, But…" will be enormously useful to teachers, at both high school and college levels…[I]ts wide diffusion will benefit all of us as citizens of a racialized society.

-K. Anthony Appiah, Carswell Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy, Harvard University.
 

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The Human Relationship with Nature.
Peter H. Kahn. MIT Press, 1999. ISBN 0-262-11240-X.

Winner of Outstanding Book Award, 2000, Moral Development and Education, American Educational Research Association.

Urgent environmental problems call for vigorous research and theory on how humans develop a relationship with nature. In a series of original research projects, Peter Kahn answers this call. For eight years, Kahn studied children, young adults, and parents in diverse geographical locations, ranging from an economically impoverished black community in Houston to a remote village in the Brazilian Amazon. In these studies Kahn sought answers to the following questions: How do people value nature, and how do they reason morally about environmental degradation? Do children have a deep connection to the natural world that gets severed by modern society? Or do such connections emerge, if at all, later in life, with increased cognitive and moral maturity? How does culture affect environmental commitments and sensibilities? Are there universal features in the human relationship with nature? Kahn's empirical and theoretical findings draw on current work in psychology, biology, environmental behavior, education, policy, and moral development.
 

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The Secret Lives of Girls.
Sharon Lamb. Free Press, 2002. ISBN 0-743-23306-9.

An eye-opening look at what girls are really like. On the flipside of Reviving Ophelia, The Secret Lives of Girls, gives voice to healthy and powerful, if hidden, aspects of pre-teenage girls’ real experiences. With honor, resilience, and a sense of right and wrong, girls find ways to engage with those taboo areas of sex, aggression, anger, and competition. The result of over 125 eye-opening interviews with girls, pre-teens, teens, and adult women, Dr. Sharon Lamb uncovers their private sexual play, hidden aggression, mischief, and guilt revealing a complexity in girls that is far too often ignored by adults.
 

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Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply about Real Life and their School Work.
Katherine G. Simon. Yale University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-300-09032-3.

Motivated by a suspicion that schools fail to teach what "matters," Simon, director of research at the Coalition of Essential Schools in California, spent months observing literature, history and biology classes at a public, a Catholic and a Jewish high school. What "matters" to Simon is the integration of moral and existential inquiry into the classroom; she argues that not only are moral and existential questions at the heart of the major disciplines, they are also extremely compelling to students. But too much of what goes on in schools, she contends, is "the forming of uninformed opinions" and "decontextualized fact acquisition." Although she shows how even good teachers sometimes deflect or shut down important discussions, Simon places the blame squarely on the education system that works "against teachers being able to incorporate discussions of substantive issues into their classrooms."

-From Publishers Weekly
 

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The goal of this volume is to bring together current research on morality in human development. Morality in its various forms is a dominant influence on the conduct and evaluation of day-to-day life. The pervasiveness of the moral domain can be detected in every aspect of social life; moral commitments shape the goals and aspiriations of individuals, and moral judgments are apparent in the discourse about most forms of human interaction. The various chapters in the book present the most current advances and consider the complex issues revolving around morality. These include fundamental developmental questions such as Where does morality come from and how is it acquired (origins)? How does morality change overtime (sequence)? How does culture play a role in the acquisition of morality? What does morality look like throughout the lifespan (ontogenesis)? The contributors were asked to address these issues with respect to two overall guiding themes for the book: context (everyday life) and development.

Contributors include: Hay, Castle, Stimson, & Davies (chap 1), Killen & Nucci (chap 2), Arsenio & Lover (chap3), Laupa,Turiel, & Cowan (chap 4), Helwig (chap 5), Berkowitz, Kahn, Mulry, & Piette (cahp 6), Smetana (chap 7), Miller & Bersoff (chap 9), Wainryb & Turiel (chap 9), Hart, Yates, Fegley, & Wilson (chap 10), Colby & Damon (chap 11), Walker, Pitts, Hennig, & Matsuba (chap 12).

For more information contact Melanie Killen, mk141@umail.umd.edu, Dept. of Human Development, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, or Daniel Hart, Dept. of Psychology, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ.
 

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This highly readable treatment of current work in the field of moral psychology (and moral development in particular) is like a breath of fresh air. The book's integration of philosophy and psychology is superb. Lapsley takes the reader through a comprehensive course of study that begins with an exceptionally clear exposition of Piaget's structuralism and the Piagetian account of moral growth. Lapsley's balanced treatment of Piaget is followed by an insider's account of the Kohlberg project. He employs the Kohlbergian paradigm as the central organizing thesis of his book. Here again, Lapsley is even-handed and comprehensive in his treatment both of theory and practice. One measure of an author's scholarship is his capacity to treat rival perspectives with fairness and accuracy. Lapsley provides voice to Kohlberg's critics by explicating their points of view as if he were a proponent of each alternative In the end, he sustains a basically Kohlbergian position, but does so in the context of the most comprehensive treatment of the field available. Lapsley moves from his discussion of Kohlberg to include research on prosocial development, personality and the moral self, and related issues of virtue and character. Because of its readability and thoroughness, this volume may serve as both a text and a resource for scholars.

For more information contact Daniel K. Lapsley, dklapsley@bsuvc.bsu.edu
 

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This book addresses the question of how to establish an interpersonal classroom atmosphere that fosters children's intellectual, social, moral, emotional, and personal development. The authors discuss the theoretical foundation of this approach, which emphasizes cooperative teacher-student relationships, and contrasts it with the more traditional behaviorist approach. In later chapters the authors demonstrate how the constructivist orientation can be embedded in a school program by focusing on specific situations - conflict resolution, grouptime, cleanup, lunchtime, naptime, and the "difficult" child - and on more generalized aspects such as academics and the overall school atmosphere.

For more information contact Rheta Devries,Rheta.DeVries@UNI.EDU
 

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"Most people tell teens what not to do. It's Up To Us assumes that they want to do the right thing and gives them inspiring stories and pratical tools that will help them be responsible, productive members of their communities. Here, finally, is something to say 'Yes!' to."

-Wally Amos, author of Watermelon Magic.
   

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This clear and highly readable book presents an overview of research on children's moral development. The author draws from his own work and that of others to present a clearly thought out approach to fostering moral growth in children. The book traces the emergence of caring attachments and judgments about fairness from infancy to adolecscence. Damon also describes the constructive role which parents and teachers can play, through "respectful engagement", to foster and nuture moral growth in children.

Chapter headings: 1 Moral concern's from the child's perspective; 2 Empathy, shame and guilt; 3 Learning about justice through sharing, 4 Parental authority and rules of the family, 5 Interacting as equals: cooperative play in the peer group, 6 Culture, gender and morality, 7 Fostering children's moral growth, 8 Teaching values in schools.
 

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Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education.
F. Clark Power, Ann Higgins, and Lawrence Kohlberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-231-05976-0.

"The clearest and most compelling theoretical statement on the 'Just Community Approach' that I have seen. It explains how this approach is an extension from earlier views of Kohlberg on moral education….An extraordinarily important book for psychologists, educators, and those interested in social values. This book could well set the agenda for morality research and education for the next decade."

-James R. Rest University of Minnesota
 

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In this book Donald Reed brings together in one source the psychological research on Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, the philosophical premises which undergird it, and the interventions that have been made in schools and prisons based on applications of Kohlberg’s theory. Reed goes beyond this valuable overview to show how this vision of moral development informs a broader conception of social and moral reform. In doing so, Reed illustrates how Kohlberg’s deeper concerns for justice, fairness, democratic community and moral education can be appreciated independent of the empirical status of his moral stage theory.
 

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Perhaps the most widely used measure for assessing the impact of educational programs on moral development has been the Defining Issues Test (DIT) developed by James Rest and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota. This book presents the most recent work and theorizing on moral development by the James Rest research group, particularly with regard to issues of development among adults. In this book the authors employ their research with the Defining Issues Test (DIT) to reconceptualize post-conventional moral thought as presented within the Kohlbergian framework. The authors take issue with several contemporary approaches, such as domain theory, and cultural psychology, and attempt to address those perspective from within the cognitive psychology point of view which they characterize as neo-Kohlbergian. The book is clearly written, and should prove to be a valuable resource for researchers and scholars in the field of moral development.
 

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This book describes how the everyday events that take place in classrooms may take on moral significance for students and teachers. This highly readable account is based on observations sunducted in elementary and high school classrooms. The book provides new insights for how teachers may view their activities and provides suggestions for how to look at classroom events from a moral perspective.

For more information contact David T. Hansen, DHansen@uic.edu
 

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"This is a major contribution to the growing literature on character education. The book shows how character education was central to the mission of early American schools, why it declined in this century, and how its renewal has been spurred by the U.S. Department of Education's Blue Ribbon Awards program. It offers a rich compendium of character education practices drawn from more than 100 Blue Ribbon winners all across America - schools large and small, affluent and poor, homogeneous and diverse. It distills these many practices into six that seem to represent the "best practice" of character building schools. It provides conceptual criteria to help the reader understand why not every values-related practice in a Blue Ribbon School necessarily qualifies as true character education. Throughout the book we are told where to get more information about the programs cited so we can judge them for ourselves. Madonna Murphy's book provides, in my judgment, the most complete and detailed picture available of what is happening in character education today."

-From the Foreword by Tom Lickona
 

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This book is the first to examine character development and moral action in sport and physical activity contexts. This comprehensive reference:

• introduces the major theories of character development, from Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to Haan’s model of interactional morality;
• outlines a 12 component model of moral action that can be used to integrate diverse theories and research findings;
• reviews empirical research that has been conducted in the area of morality and physical activity contexts; and
• offers 40 recommendations for encouraging character growth in physical education, informal games and sports, and organized youth sports
  

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The best available single source for practical suggestions for how to foster moral development and character formation in schools and classrooms. The author combines concerns for development and reasoning with a traditional character education approach.
 

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