Ethics and the Early Childhood Educator Using the NAEYC Code

by Stephanie Feeney, Nancy K. Freeman, Eva Moravcik

Doing what’s right for children, families, colleagues, and the community Do you need support and guidance to help you navigate tough ethical issues in your work? The NAEYC Code of Ethical Conduct is every early childhood educator’s foundation for moral practice, and this third edition of Ethics and the Early Childhood Educator shows you how to use the Code to guide your actions and responses to challenging situations in the workplace. Here, you’ll find real cases from early childhood programs that illustrate the process of identifying and addressing ethical issues by applying the NAEYC Code. Reflection questions encourage you to think deeply about how your own experiences relate to the examples. Ethical conduct is critical, and the Code and this book are resources you can turn to again and again as you seek to make the right decisions for young children and their families.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

109 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Stephanie Feeney, PhD, is professor emerita of education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is coauthor of NAEYC’s “Code of Ethical Conduct” and NAEYC’s books about professional ethics. She participated in the development of supplements to the code for adult educators and program administrators and has written extensively about ethics in early care and education. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Professionalism in Early Childhood Education: Doing Our best for Young Children and coauthor of Who Am I in the Lives of Children?

Reviews

[Tony Laplume · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half feels like it generalizes just trying to reach the second half, which helpfully tries to explain what the book actually means about ethics, although as a reader I was never really convinced it understood its own point. The second half is case scenarios, and they’re not thought out very well. One case tries to explain the concept via coworker relations, but becomes confused when it explains that the first coworker immediately presses the issue (at the second incident) and somehow the situation doesn’t improve. Well, I can come up with an alternative explanation for that. The authors can’t, however. Two other scenarios attempt to explain how school learning automatically trumps practical experience. One suggests a system that is clearly not broken somehow is absolutely broken. Another is a laughably obvious example of a broken system that actually simulates a lot of what classrooms are always trying to suggest. Other scenarios are obvious and don’t really bring up ethical problems, or how to solve them. It’s a frustratingly unhelpful book and doesn’t get into how a failing system fails early childhood educators much more than just about any imagined ethical scenario. Fortunately the next book I started in the subject field is about leadership. A lot of these books are almost entirely useless in the vacuums they imagine. They keep missing the point. Leadership seems like a good way to overcome that.

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to read and highly applicable to my profession. This text will be useful when facing future ethical dilemmas.

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone who works with children, you will encounter the problems presented in the case studies.

Very well written and well done, would recommend to anyone working with or around children.

[Amber]

1 copy