Impacts to Teachers’ Process of Ethical Decision-Making: How the Online Classroom Changes Phronesis

Abstract

Context:

Remote and online learning have become features of K–12 education since the Covid-19 school closures. Despite the increasing presence of online classrooms, the theoretical and ethical dimensions of this shift remain underexplored. While much attention has been paid to issues of access, equity, and instructional design, less consideration has been given to how this change has reshaped the moral and relational dimensions of teaching.

Objective:

This article explores how the transition to online classrooms affects a central component of teaching practice: teachers’ capacity for practical ethical reasoning, or phronesis. Specifically, we investigate how the digital environment influences the everyday ethical decisions that teachers must make in real time, often without clear policies or precedents. We aim to better understand the nature of these changes and their implications for education.

Research Design:

We take an applied philosophical approach to outline how the online teaching environment alters teachers’ ethical decision-making processes. Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of phronesis and contemporary scholarship on teaching and pedagogy, we examine how changes to the privacy and physical proximity of the online format shape a teacher’s “ethical toolkit” and, therefore, their in-the-moment ethical decision-making process. We use a normative case study in educational ethics to illustrate the implications of this shift for students, teachers, and families. Importantly, we differentiate between the ethical challenges posed by online schooling and the tools that teachers use to address them.

Conclusions:

Although some challenges of the online format can be mitigated, we argue that it fundamentally and irreversibly disrupts teachers’ capacity for ethical decision-making, ultimately weakening their ability to respond to complex moral situations with the nuance we would hope for in an educational space. Using the case study, we show that essential components of in-person teaching—such as informal student interactions, embodied communication, and privacy—are significantly reduced or absent in virtual classrooms. These findings raise important questions about how to support ethical teaching in digital spaces and caution against viewing online education as a neutral or universally applicable alternative.