week 2 dq 2

The code of ethical conduct is way too vague on this subject for me. For me the description of the events is easy. Chuck should not have slept with a former student period. He should immediately report the event to his supervisors.

The response from the university should be never to have the two of them in said positions again. He should never be allowed to be her teacher again.

If he has a history of said behaviors with a string of previous students, he needs to lose his job and possibly be reported to the police as a possible future sex crimes perp.

His actions were entirely unethical in most ways. The teacher student dynamic is a careful and fragile one, very easy to be destroyed by natural human instincts (Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, & Norman, 2010).

Having been the victim of an entirely unwanted sequence of advances from a person in a similar position, I was adversely affected by this interaction. Although in my case the teacher’s assistant and I were still in the same class together (online) and the class went as badly as it could. The funny part of this is that from the assignment that blew up that interaction, the assignment, the class, and my time at that school I took the assignment I was working on which happened to be about how the MMPR was created and expanded it into a huge book about the Wannsee Conferences.

That book expanded into a series/sequence of books about the Lake Nemi Ships which lead to information about the Pyramids of Egypt. From a (cyber) sexual assault some good did come from the interaction. The three people directly involved form the school reacted as badly as they could have. The perp, the teacher, and the teacher’s boss did not follow any of the rules of the code of conduct (American Psychological Association. (2010). I did find out about a year later the perp (female) was fired, but the school went hard and heavy behind privacy laws. The perp’s privacy became sacrosanct (Corty, 2008). The school did not offer me any type of (not money) compensation for the event. I failed that class, the school refused to review the grade, refused to acknowledge I had called and emailed “I am out of here, take this class away”, the school flat refused to cooperate in any way minus firing the perp (Haney, 2004). Not a single aspect of said behavior from the school was acceptable ethically (Stavredes, 2011). I have personally been on the abusive portion of this type of situation, and no matter how many rules and regulations ethically are printed out, when lawyers and money are involved, the school could not care less about anything other than “where is my money”. Silencing the event is their close to top priority. A scenario is one thing, we students have to write these “what would we do”, in these classes in grad school. But our actions mean nothing compared to what the administration does. The administration decides what is ethical and ok, the rule book only counts with the people with the 1000$ an hour salary decide it says. Should Chuck be treated x way, our opinion has no weight at all. The school’s opinion is the only one that matters, and most of the time the school’s opinion will go with what does not embarrass them, what makes them the most money, and what advantage they can achieve through the event (Tabachnick, Keith-Spiegal, & Pope, 1991). The rule book makes little difference. Just because that undergrad teacher should not be allowed to teach that student again, will likely be done. But unless it is egregious the admin will do little to nothing. What happens after, is entirely up to the admin, my and eventually every student who is writing these answers opinion makes absolutely no difference in the real world. He should not be allowed to teach her again. But that is the admins call.

References

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: 7 research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

American Psychological Association. (2010). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct: Including 2010 amendments. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx

Chapter 17, “Strategies for Managing Ethical and Legal Issues” (pp. 223–240)

Corty, E. W. (2008). Resolving a conflict between APA learning goals and APA ethical principles. Teaching of Psychology, 35(3), 223–225.

Haney, M. R. (2004). Ethical dilemmas associated with self-disclosure in student writing. Teaching of Psychology, 31(3), 167–171.

Stavredes, T. (2011). Effective online teaching: Foundations and strategies for student success. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Svinicki, M., & McKeachie, W. J. (2014). The ethics of teaching. In McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers (14th ed., pp. 319–327). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Tabachnick, B. G., Keith-Spiegal, P., & Pope, K. S. (1991). Ethics of teaching: Beliefs and behaviors of psychologists as educators. American Psychologist, 46(5), 506–515.