Opinions from Teacher Educators in Mexico about the Preparation They Receive in Professional Ethics

In Mexico there are two parallel educational systems that train two types of teachers. One is in the universities and the other is in “Normal Schools”. The principal purpose of the second one is to prepare young people to become teachers – that will instruct children in primary and secondary schools in Mexico-. The objective of the research was to understand the preparation that these teachers receive about professional ethics. To do that, we applied a questionnaire and an attitude scale to 43 teachers, to find out their opinion about professional ethics. As in other countries, in ours there is a tendency to evaluate teachers’ practices following national and international guidelines. In international measurements, we have continuously obtained very low outcomes. The wide diffusion of these results has triggered several critiques from the social agents. This abundant and diversified criticism has contributed to deteriorate the social image of teachers from public schools. We will present some theoretical elements about the uncertainty of the professional practice of teachers in Mexico and the classification of the answers given by the sample of the teachers that studied the graduate program: “Specialization in Basic Tools for Educational Research” offered by the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, to two open questions: Obstacles that Normal Schools educators confront to train future teachers in professional values and Action proposals in professional values training. We found that teachers are interested in a better cognitive knowledge and actualization; an approach to norms, rules and codes about values and ethical themes; the consequences of their professional decisions; the importance of team work and personal relations and communication. They consider themselves a behavioral model for their students and propose several ways to face the increasing uncertainty.