Values Education for a Pluralist Society

Increasingly I have come to believe that educating students to understand their values about people and relationships is an essential aspect of preparing them for professional practice. In this paper I explore the challenges involved in facilitating students’ learning processes when values exploration is on the agenda, especially when controversy may occur from sharing value-based opinions. This paper also delineates my position and processes in teaching about values as they have developed in my work with students and although human service students are referred to at times as an illustrative case, the paper has relevance for all fields of university education. The overall contention of the paper is that values education is an essential responsibility of the modern university in adequately preparing students to survive in the current society of work. Values Education for a Pluralist Society Introduction In this paper I explore some of the pressures that surround the processes of educating people for professional practice in current Australian society, particularly in reference to the areas of intercultural communication competence and values awareness. Although this paper focuses at times on my experiences in educating social welfare practitioners, many of the issues apply equally to other professional human service groups, such as nurses, doctors and other health workers, teachers, and lawyers, and any others whose work involves relating closely and personally with their clients. I have come to see that educating students to understand their values about people and relationships, and establishing responsible and ethical frames for professional practice, is really about helping them to become more aware of the influence of their own cultural and social heritage and, at times, to transcend these influences. Gudykunst & Kim (1997:254) refer to this as ‘establishing a psychological link’ between their own cultural values and beliefs and those of the other person—a hallmark of effective interaction with others. They perceive this to be an advanced level of intercultural competence, and describe a person with such competence as operating from a ‘third culture’ space, characterised especially by ‘nonjudgmentalness, openness, tolerance for ambiguity, and interaction management’. Through the course of this paper I demonstrate that encouraging students to be more courageous in declaring their own values and skilled in accepting others’ are essential features of all education programs in the modern university. Educating students for professional practice is inevitably imbued with responsibility, but even more so when the task is one of preparing people for high contact work, where the day-to-day procedures entail expressions of personal and institutional values. But if our students are to survive in the current world of work following graduation, they need to be supported in moving towards greater acceptance of responsibility for communicating effectively. This entails operating from a position of ethical self-agency in their relationship with others, and developing ‘emotional intelligence’ as described by Golman (1995), and this includes being able to estimate situations and the best responses to these. Universities have been criticised roundly for emphasising erudite areas of pure knowledge at the expense of more applied practical knowledge, with additional emphasis on flexible skills, as in the 1999 Report from the Department of Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business, and the earlier Mayer (1992) and Finn (1991) and Candy et al (1994) reports. According to these views, students need to emerge from university work-ready, with a strong profile of skill in the areas of interpersonal engagement and teamwork, and the associated acceptance of others’ values implicit in these communication processes. Preparing students for the uncertainties and pressures of human service work Invocations persist to prepare the nation’s workers by developing good communication skills in students (Hobart 1999:42), though there is little consensus about how to make this happen (McKenzie 1998:1,2). Bauman (1992:106) suggests that universities still neglect to provide their graduates with a passport for safe passage into the worlds of work, which he describes as ‘irreducibly pluralist’. The charge is one of graduating students with heads buzzing with information and theory, but with poorly developed frames of ethical reference, and with few skills to cope with the interpersonal demands of professional practice. This limits workers’ chances