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Exploring Educational Excellence

By Kaija Teikari

The author considers the concept of educational excellence through the lens of ethics. She
reports on a dissertation study set in a single Finnish town and focusing on the concepts of
values and virtues identified by members of the education community as helping to define
excellence in their setting.

s a member of the 2022–2024 DKG Educational Excellence Committee, I have
Arealized the group has both an informative and a practical role in connecting
education with excellence. In this article, I explore educational excellence through
the lens of philosophical ethics. Ethics is the study of questions about what is
morally right and wrong (The Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary, 2006, p. 483).
Ethics appears as a kind of umbrella term under which values and virtues dwell.
This article summarizes some key points of my academic dissertation: Exploring
Ethics. A Philosophical Inquiry into the
Education Sector of One Finnish City (2016).
Ethics appears as a kind of The research data were acquired through a
survey in comprehensive and upper secondary
umbrella term under which schools of a Finnish city. The data were
analyzed using heuristic, phenomenographic,
values and virtues dwell. and phenomenological methods. Findings
suggested that both practice and theory are
needed to define an excellent educator.
A philosopher is one who wonders if
something seen to work in practice will also
work in theory (Teikari, 2016 p. 18). The humorous picture in Figure 1 could also
refer to the transition from practice into theory in my research work: a philosopher
going around in a school conducting a heuristic inquiry and carrying out interviews
in order to explore and trace definitions for ethics. Douglass and Moustakas (1985)
offered this explanation: “Heuristics refers to the Greek word heuriskein: to discover
or find … Heuristics is concerned with meanings, not measurements; with essence,
not appearance; with quality, not quantity; with experience, not behavior” (Patton,
2002). In this article, on the route toward discovering educational excellence,
I connect theories of ethics—and moreover values and virtues—with practical
research data provided by respondents of a Finnish education sector.

14 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators