Three Podcast Episodes on Lawrence Kohlberg and Moral Development

One of the thinkers whose work I teach in my Ethics classes is the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg.  I tend to assign his essay "Moral Development: A Review of the Theory," which provides a good overview of his six stages of moral development, and also discusses its applications to and implications for K-12 education.  Some time back, I shot a sequence of three core concept videos covering the main ideas of the piece.

Recently, in order to provide the same lecture material to my students in another format, I edited the sound files from those videos into Sadler's Lectures podcast episodes.  I boost the sound quality where possible, and take out all of the"ums", "ahs", and other such filler, so that listeners get an improved lecture.

If you'd like to listen to or download these episodes, you can do so in a variety of places - Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Player FM, as well as other sites - but the best place to do so is on my Soundcloud.  Here's those three episodes:

• Six Stages Of Moral Development
• Form And Content In Moral Development
• Moral Development And Education

All told, they come to a bit more than 40 minutes total playing time, so you can learn the basics about Kohlberg's moral development theory in the space of a commute, a walk, or a workout!

Three Videos on Lawrence Kohlberg's Moral Development Theory

Lawrence Kohlberg was a psychologist particularly interested in human moral development.  His six-level model has ben incredibly influential not only in the fields of psychology and education, but also in philosophy, where it is regularly taught and discussed in ethics classes. 

Since I was teaching him early on in my Ethics for Artists and Designers class at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design this semester, I decided to create some new core concept videos as resources for my students, knowing that they would also prove useful for the broader public.

As a little known side-note (perhaps something I'll do some writing about down the line), we typically associate Kohlberg with the moral development of children in educational institutions, with general moral development of adults, or with the many critiques of his theory (particularly those leveled by his student, Carol Gilligan, in her book, In a Different Voice).  One important area of his research - as I discovered when I was putting together a talk on my own experience teaching philosophy in that setting - was with prisoners and correctional officers.

Here are those three core concept videos:

• Six Stages of Moral Development
• Form and Content In Moral Development
• Moral Development and Education

If you find these useful for you, share them with others.  If you'd like to support my ongoing work, making philosophy more publicly accessible, consider buying me a coffee, or becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon.

Ethics and Prison Education

This past August, my colleague Joseph Osei and I provided a workshop on moral transformation and teaching philosophy in prisons at the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (my portion, with handouts, is available here, and videos here)  Joseph had proposed the workshop idea to me back in winter, and I readily agreed.  I came to Fayetteville State directly after having taught six years full time for Ball State University at Indiana State Prison, and I had been mulling over the experiences of working in a prison, interacting with inmates, seeing growth and transformation in some of them, unsure as to what to do with those experiences and reflections.  I knew that eventually I wanted to write about it, but the topic was so vast, so heterogeneous, had so many vantage points from which it could be looked at, that I never got around to doing more than corresponding with a few of my former students and answering questions people asked once they found out about my years at ISP

So, the conference and the panel provided me the occasion to finally start thinking, researching, and writing on prison education in a more serious and directed way.  I began reading my way through the literature on prison education, some of which is admittedly quite poorly thought out or bent so ideologically as to be useless for anyone who has not boarded that particular thought-train.  There are a number of very interesting, useful, and thought-provoking articles available, albeit relatively few on Philosophy.  There are more writings on ethics and on moral development written by non-philosophers, since academic philosophers are generally uninterested in any serious way in prisons, crime, punishment, and moral reformation in prisons.