Edward A. David

Narrative Inquiry in Ethics Education
Part of the Research Methods in Education Series of Cambridge Elements

Abstract

Ethics education has become an increasingly important feature of higher education. Universities are expected not only to develop disciplinary expertise, but also to prepare graduates for responsible leadership and ethical decision-making in professional and public life. This expectation extends across undergraduate programmes and professional fields such as business, law, medicine, and public policy. Yet despite substantial investment in ethics curricula, it remains difficult to determine how ethical learning occurs and how the effectiveness of ethics-education interventions should be assessed.

One widely used approach is the use of narrative as a pedagogical tool. Through storytelling and other narrative activities, educators seek to cultivate moral awareness, including the development of character, virtue, and professional judgement among students. Narrative practices are now commonly found in ethics education through reflective writing, engagement with moral exemplars, autobiographical reflection, imaginative storytelling, and arts-based activities. Their popularity notwithstanding, it remains difficult to generate robust evidence about how such activities shape moral formation.

This Element offers a way forward. It shows how narrative inquiry—a qualitative research practice that examines how individuals make sense of experience by organising it into story form—can be used alongside classroom activities to investigate pedagogical effectiveness. Focusing on the higher education sector, it identifies four broad families of narrative activity commonly used in ethics education: lived-experience narratives, elicited imaginative narratives, narratives of moral exemplars, and arts-based narrative techniques. The Element examines how each functions pedagogically and how each can be incorporated into narrative inquiry to assess educational outcomes. Drawing on case studies from around the globe, it offers practical guidance for research design, data collection, analysis, reflexivity, and dissemination. In doing so, it provides a framework for investigating how narrative shapes moral formation and how the effectiveness of narrative-based ethics education can be studied with rigour and care.

Sections

1. Introduction
2. Planning Narrative Inquiry in Ethics Education
3. Narrative Techniques within Narrative Inquiry: Data Collection
4. Analysing Narrative Data in Ethics Education
5. Reflexivity and Ethical Responsibilities
6. Reporting and Dissemination
7. Conclusion

Forthcoming 2027.

Huge thanks to Dr Sal Consoli, series editor, for his commitment and enthusiasm behind the project.