Moral Dilemmas across Gender and Teaching Experience: A Case of Iranian High-School English Teachers

Although the criticality of morality in education has been acknowledged recently, the nature of moral dilemmas that English teachers face and the ways they deal with them have been rarely investigated. The present study aimed at filling the gap in the literature by investigating the Iranian high school EFL teachers’ narration of moral dilemmas and the decisions they made when they confronted one. The study followed a mixed-methods design. The participants of the qualitative part of the study were 120 male and female high-school English teachers, in their first, second, and third decades of teaching. The results of the qualitative part revealed that while the nature of moral dilemmas differed among both genders, evaluation was the most prevalent theme among the participants followed by work-related, pedagogical issues, and student–teacher interaction. For the quantitative part, a moral dilemma inventory was designed to which 600 participants responded. Reading some hypothetical moral dilemmas, they were supposed to choose which path (self-serving or moral) they would take. The data analysis indicated that gender and experience were both influential factors in teachers’ decision-making process. The findings imply that while score-oriented education might be the primary source of moral dilemmas, the ways teachers approach them could be rooted in different socialization of males and females, and socio-cultural context.