Education, especially early education, is one of the most fundamental elements of supporting the development of autonomous individuals, who are also caring, reflective, thoughtful, cooperative, responsible, resilient, etc., and contribute to communities both locally and globally. In this post, I want to highlight the importance of (early) ethics education for fostering the cultivationof research integrity and responsibility later on in the careers of researchers. In doing so, I will also point to some past projects that the Integrity project team at the Faculty of Theology (University of Ljubljana) has lead or been involved in. I will highlight our experiences gained and lessons learned.

Education as a process is intrinsically value-laden, both in terms of what is conveyed (content) as well as in terms of the way of implementation (methods), consequences of it (outcomes) and relationships that are formed in the educational context. Ethics education comprises all aspects of the educational process that are directly or indirectly related to the ethical dimensions of our lives and can be either planned, designed, guided and monitored with the suitable educational methods and tools, or are an implicit part of the educational processes and thus often remain unreflected or undevised. It proves to be an efficient strategy for the development of core knowledge and competencies in ethics and values since it combines critical thinking with experiential, social, and emotional learning in a classroom setting and in school life in general as encompassing the entire educational community. School is also one of the last public spaces where children can learn and experience the “basics” of cooperation, fairness, inclusiveness, etc., starting with the respectful discussion within their own classroom.

The commonly identified goals of ethics education are the following: (i) to promote ethical reflection, autonomy, and responsibility; (ii) to enable examination and understanding of important ethical principles, values, virtues, and ideals; (iii) to build character and to cultivate intellectual and moral abilities (critical thinking, reflective perception, appreciation, compassion, valuing, etc.) needed for responsible moral judgment, decision-making, and action; (iv) to guide towards exploration of different moral viewpoints, different dimensions of values and different moral justifications; (v) to enable overcoming of prejudices, biases, discrimination, and other unethical attitudes and practices; (vi) to promote respectful, cooperative, and collaborative behaviour, and (vii) to help to (self)situate individuals as members of local and global communities with one of the tasks being that of contributing to them. Such a comprehensive understanding of ethics education aims at the heart of what John Dewey determined as the general goal of education, which amounts to “the formation of a cultivated and effectively operative good judgment or taste with respect to what is aesthetically admirable, intellectually acceptable and morally approvable” (Dewey 1980, 262). Ethics education incites individuals to make values relevant to, for, and in their lives in a concrete social context and in an experiential and expressive manner.

Given what was said above it is apparent that (early) ethics education in primary and secondary schools paves the way for later stages of education that may include more specific training in responsible research and research integrity.Ethics education already includes basic tenets of academic honesty that arise in a school setting at every level (e.g. as related to the prevention of cheating). Ethics education develops a basic vocabulary of values that are at the core of academic and research integrity (e.g. responsibility, respect, fairness, trustworthiness, etc.) and cultivates key moral and intellectual virtues embedded in research integrity (e.g. intellectual honesty, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, intellectual courage, etc.). Using holistic, experiential and practice-oriented teaching and learning all this then gets transferred to the level of attitudes and practices in an everyday school setting. Of course, this does not mean that the transfer of these values, virtues, and attitudes from a classroom context to a later research setting is without quandaries or that a more focused research integrity education becomes thus less relevant. On the contrary, the latter builds on the basis of the already established (moral) identity of the individual and add to it more specific competence in research integrity. Both go hand in hand together.

Nonetheless, highlighting the importance of early ethics education is important, in particular in the context in which some European countries still lack a comprehensive framework for its implementation at the level of school curriculums or are facing challenges on the level of its practical implementation (e.g. lack opportunities for teachers to gain relevant knowledge and skills in this domain).Both aspects of this challenge have their parallels in the later stages of the educational process, including state of the art in research integrity education at the university level and related research training. Our anticipation at the University of Ljubljana is that the INTEGRITY – Empowering students through evidence-based, scaffolded learning of Responsible Conduct in Research project will help us substantially in addressing the mentioned challenge.