Abstract
The proposed dilemma is directed at adults, especially educators. It consists of a situation in which a teacher is questioned about the grade given to her student. She is convinced that she is correct about the grade but is pressured by the school coordination to change it. Values such as justice and self-preservation come into play.
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Keywords
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Audience: Adults (university students and teachers)
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Area: Education
Marina is a teacher at a private school in the early years of elementary level. After receiving their daughter’s corrected Portuguese language test and its corresponding grade, a family called the school and asked about their daughter losing one point on a question. The father claimed to disagree with the teacher about the answer to a multiple-choice question.
The pedagogical coordinator sent a written phone message to the teacher, saying that the family had complained and called the school, in which the coordinator had decided that the father was right. The coordinator then asked the teacher to review the question and the student’s grade.
Marina talked to her colleagues who teach in the same grade about the assessment, because the test was the same for everyone. They agreed that the question was not wrong, and pointed to the page in the book with the concepts that justified the answer.
Marina finds herself in a conflicting situation, because if she argues with the coordination, she could be misinterpreted and even lose her job, in a difficult period such as the pandemic. If she does not argue and accepts the correction, which she considers inadequate, she will be unfair to the rest of the class. It is worth mentioning that the parents are very active in the education of their daughter and pay the school on time, even in times of pandemic.
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© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
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Borges, G.D. (2024). To Argue or to Obey?. In: Bataglia, P.U.R., Alves, C.P., Parente, E.M.P.P.R. (eds) Studies on Moral Competence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52139-3_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52139-3_32
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-031-52139-3
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