There are no Answers, Only Choices: Teaching Ethical Decision Making in Social Work

The author advocates an approach to teaching ethics in social work that helps students recognise the moral implications of their work and develop a deep understanding about ethical issues and their personal responsibility for making ethical choices. The paper describes a learning unit that seeks to teach students about ethical decision making as a critical thinking process and, in so doing, to integrate students' knowledge and experience of values, ethics, policy, and research in the final year of study. The relationship between values, ethics, policy, research, and social work practice provides an ideal context within which students could learn to integrate their knowledge and experience and apply it directly to their fieldwork practice.