Revista Iberoamericana sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación (Jun 2016)
Knowledge and Vital Commitment. The challenges of Global Ethics in Professional Practice of Educational Research
Abstract
Parting from Edgar Morin’s (2005) proposal for a global ethic, and Bernard Lonergan’s (1988) ethics of conducting” and method of human and social sciences “functional specialties “, this work holds as central idea the impossibility of separating the construction of knowledge in research from the vital ethical commitment of the researcher. The article draws attention to the serious problems encountered at the present and the need for a "reform of the spirit" guided by the education and the role that educational research plays on the construction of this profound reform, determining the different types of educative research in the framework of “specialized functions” proposed by Lonergan (1988) and emphasizing the nee on education to understand that the construction of knowledge may not be unlinked to the ethic of the professional of educational research. From this relationship, it is specified the vision of a complex humanistic ethic and the sources of tension and ethical contradiction faced by the researcher in their professional practice. This document concludes stating that the educational researcher requires an explicit conscience of the relationship between knowledge and ethics and their professional work and the inevitability of these tensions and contradictions to comply with two fundamental commitments set by this epoch change: The commitment to the knowledge that will lead to perform a continuous exercise to “think well” and the vital commitment to the “human good in construction” through the contribution to the improvement of the education quality.
