Teachers’ Moral Dilemmas in Balancing Academic Standards and Inclusive Commitments: A Qualitative Study in Pakistani Schools

Abstract

Educators teaching in mainstream classrooms often have to juggle conflicting professional demands on academic achievement and ethical realms of duty towards multiple students. This paper analyses the ethical challenges faced by the teachers working in Pakistani primary and secondary schools as they struggle to adopt standardized academic requirements and inclusion educational commitments. The issue of the research problem focuses on the tensions in ethics that can exist with the institutional accountability systems in contrast to the professional judgment of teachers concerning equity and student support. The main purpose of the research was to investigate how educators perceive, mediate and react to such dilemmas in the daily teaching practice. Applying a qualitative research design, single-semi structure interviews with teachers in inclusive schools in both public and private educational institutions in Pakistan were part of the process of data gathering. It was assumed in the study that the contextually oriented decision-making of morality is influenced by institutional norms, curriculum requirements and the availability of resources with boundary conditions being set by examination-oriented schooling structures. The results reflect identical issues of dilemmas pertaining to grading, grading pacing, grading accommodations, and fairness, even though the findings correspond with those in other global studies but they demonstrate factors-specific to the education system in Pakistan. The paper concludes the existence of unresolved moral tensions as a source of teacher stress and haphazard practice of inclusion by contributing to the importance of ethical support systems and policy congruence in inclusive education.

Keywords: Teacher ethics; Moral dilemmas; Inclusive education; Academic standards; Professional judgment; Qualitative inquiry; Pakistan schools.