As a university teacher, I have different roles apart from teaching, including facilitating, counselling, guiding, and assessing students on different occasions. Consequently, I have to consider the ethical dimensions of teaching, supervision, and assessment to tackle any ethical dilemmas that I may need to confront in different situations, as well as to enhance my teaching professionalism and maintain my moral integrity. I treat all my students equally and with the same respect, whether I am teaching, guiding, setting/extending deadlines, assessing, or engaging in the feedback process. Apart from unequal treatment and unfair assessment and evaluation practices, I also consider negligence in, and/or poor preparation for, teaching as unethical. I follow the ethical principles described by Murray et al. (1996) when dealing with sensitive topics, maintaining the confidentiality of student grades, their problems and other sensitive information, as well as when I am contributing to their intellectual development and avoiding conflicts of interest.

I consider that, as a university teacher, I have an ethical position and a responsibility to help and guide students to avoid plagiarism in my courses. I create original assignments for their work requirements, project work, and final assignments, in which there is less possibility for them to plagiarize. I take plagiarism seriously and investigate all suspected cases of plagiarism.

I adhere to the ethical responsibilities mentioned in the ‘Ethical guidelines for supervision at UiT the Arctic University of Norway (2016)’ during supervision. For the research projects and scientific work, I follow the guidelines in both the National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities and the National Committee for Research Ethics in Science and Technology. Very often, I have to use spatial and other statistical data from different sources in my teaching. While using different databases in teaching/learning activities, I treat personal information according to the ethical rules and guidelines of the Norwegian Social Science Data Service and maintain anonymity. No databases with personal or sensitive information are created/stored in any part of my teaching practices.

References

Murray, H., Gillese, E., Lennon, M., Mercer, P., & Robinson, M. (1996) Ethical principles for college and university teaching, in New Directions for Teaching and Learning (66), s. 57-63.

Teaching history |Basic repertoire | Assessment methods|Ethical dimension