Activity 4: Legal and ethical contexts in my digital practice
Ethical and Legal Issues and Decision Making Practices:
l'm using (Rolfe, 2001)'s self reflective model for an ethical dilemma that occurred when I was the year 9 Dean. Helton and Ray (2005) mention unethical scenarios experienced by teachers, for me this situation involved school and law policies, and student accusations.
l'm using (Rolfe, 2001)'s self reflective model for an ethical dilemma that occurred when I was the year 9 Dean. Helton and Ray (2005) mention unethical scenarios experienced by teachers, for me this situation involved school and law policies, and student accusations.
The “What”:
A student was being bullied online via social media. I followed the school's protocol for a restorative session to address the online bullying. I took proper documentation notes and filled incident reports. Parents, guidance counsellors, and the tutor teachers were notified of the situation.
Unfortunately I was placed in an ethical dilemma with a revised New Zealand law against online bullying . From the Beehive.Gov site (2017) Ms. Adams is quoted as saying “The Harmful Digital Communications Act made it illegal to send messages and post material online that deliberately causes a victim serious emotional distress,” . Each party was claiming innocence and I was criticised for taking sides by the accused student's parent.
"So What": Ehrich et al. (2011) “model of ethical decision-making”
The school code of conduct, social media laws, and my word against a student's were called into question. The domino's lined up from student to parent to staff to Guidance and all the way up to the Principal. The police were also informed of the online bullying. The parent of the accused did not understand that New Zealand and the school guidelines use laws that "tackles cyber bullying head on and simplifies the process for getting harmful communications off the internet quickly and effectively, while still respecting the right to free speech.” (Adams, 2017)
The Critical Incident was the effect of online bullying and the new laws that prevent and stop online bullying. The "Zero Tolerance" policy of my school and the recently passed laws made this situation very important. It was the first real incident that I had proper documentation for and it would set a precedent within our school.
The accused's parents claimed innocence and that the school was targeting their child because of past issues. They were threatening to bring in a lawyer because they felt their child was being victimised by false allegations and unwarrantable threats from the school.
Due to the ethical dilemma I had to decide whether to continue with the restorative meeting despite the risk of lawyers getting involved escalating the matter. Our actions were based on another Adams quote from the beehive “The law tackles cyber bullying head on and simplifies the process for getting harmful communications off the internet quickly and effectively, while still respecting the right to free speech.” So the Principal, Deputy Principal and myself met with the accused family.
The "Now What":
As the meeting with parents of the accused student commenced we allowed the student and parents to speak their minds. We readdressed the school policy and the law mandate that dealt with online bullying. The parents were confronted with a print out of their child's messages. They were dated, named and addressed to the bullied student. Also, bullying comments were directed at myself, the principal ,and deputy principal. Needless to say the child and parent had a private conversation to come up with a possible agreement that would not require the police or exclusion The follow-through of Ehrich's model with taking action from an internal process produced a great example that prevented further online bullying. Having the ability to trace back to the original poster lead to a decrease in online bullying.
Appendix
Beehive.govt.nz website, (2017) Cyberbullying law holding offenders to account, quotes from Amy Adams
Ehrich,L.C. , Kimber, M. , Millwater, J. & Cranston, N. (2011)
Ethical dilemmas: a model to understand teacher practice, Teachers and Teaching: theory and
practice, 17:2, 173-185, DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2011.539794
Helton, G.B., & Ray, B.A. (2005). Strategies school practitioners report they would use
to resist pressure to practice unethically. Journal of Applied School Psychology, 22(1),
43–65.
Rolfe Et al’s (2001) Reflective modal. University of Cumbria. Retrieved from https://my.cumbria.ac.uk/media/MyCumbria/Documents/ReflectiveModelRolfe.pdf
Do you feel as a professional the problem was dealt with properly because it seems like the student and parent got results but the teachers and DP's did not get justice.
ReplyDeleteThis seems like a good resolution and an opportunity to set a precedent. Do you think the escalation by the parents was due to them not having knowledge of the new law and if they had known about it do you think they would have reacted in this way?
ReplyDeleteHi Dean, from the results for the DP's and teachers getting justice, there was not enough word count for me to really go into depth of the actual resolve. In saying that, I was attempting to imply that after the parents saw the evidence we had from their child they apologized immensely to the staff for the behavior of their child. So they did get their justice so to say.
ReplyDeleteLance the law that was passed did have some relevance to the escalation of the event, but in saying that the main reason for the escalation was that the parents thought it was all hear say and no one really had any evidence except word of mouth. They were just taking their child's because at home they were always respectful and considerate. Unfortunately at school their child was taking on a different persona.