Measuring teachers’ ethical sensitivity during university training

In the last thirty years, several studies have focused on teachers’ professional competences, without entering into sufficient detail about their ethical competences, which are essential to guiding classroom actions as well as relations with students and their families, and their colleagues at school. Studies concerning these aspects of teachers’ professional profiles have begun to be published only relatively recently . The issue has been discussed in theoretical and empirical research contributions, in particular since the 1990s onwards. On the one hand, these studies have shown that teachers underestimate the impact that their conduct and value choices have on their students’ ethical education: daily educational and teaching practices imply values which are often assumptions and thus difficult to analyse and manage in a fully conscious manner . On the other hand, different studies have shown that practising teachers perceive themselves to be poorly prepared in this respect . This study will therefore deal with the question of the development of teachers’ ethical competences, starting from their initial training. The paper will present a review of international studies on the subject. It will then analyse the results of a series of studies conducted on random samples of students attending the final year of the degree course in Primary Education Science at the University of Turin for the purpose of analysing the characteristics of trainee teachers’ ethical competences in greater depth.