I have to be honest. Even though I am a TESL degree holder, my number one subject will always be Methods in Teaching Moral Education.

By the name itself, it does not sound that appealing. Even the word "Moral" is not interesting and intriguing. However, if we really look at the foundations of morality, we will find that the teaching of morality is a difficult task to achieve. Morality has been a serious question since the beginning of time. "What is the right thing to do?", "How do we know if something is right or wrong?".

In this course, I learnt that in order for the teaching of morality to happen effectively, imposing moral values to children, i.e. shoving down moral values down their throat, is not encouraged. We need the children to think for themselves critically with proper guidance from teachers. I was introduced to "Philosophical Inquiry" method that was formulated based on John Dewey's philosophy of progressivism in Methods in Teaching Moral Education 1. This method basically involves a lot of dialogues; questions and answers. It also requires students to share their personal understanding, experience and feelings to one another. The teacher must act as a mediator to moderate the discussion; prompt questions, probe replies and challenge students' understanding on the subject matter.

Methods in Teaching Moral Education 2, however, further elaborated this method by taking Islamic religious views into account. As a result, a more holistic method that is called as "Hikmah Pedagogy" was developed by Prof. Dr. Rosnani Hashim employing Philosophical Inquiry as its basis . Even to this day, whenever I teach English, especially Literature, I will try to incorporate this method into my teaching to cultivate students' critical, creative and caring thinking. This method also helps me in a way students are encouraged to express themselves in the English language.

I am eternally grateful that I was introduced to Moral Philosophy -or else known as Ethics- courses. Learning Ethics was extremely confusing and heavy, yet the satisfaction that you got after digesting the various views and ideas was what made it all worth the headache.

Moral Philosophy courses taught me to always be open to perspectives. I remembered a quote that my lecturer, Dr. Afareez used to say, "Distinguish between knowledge and the truth". At first it didn't sound logical. But that is just how the way philosophy is. People may have a lot to say about an issue, but that does not make all the facts and opinions true. Yes, facts are not truth. Facts are just something that can be verified by objective evidence. Over time, some facts are bound to changes. Remember the planet Pluto? Before, it was a known fact that there were 9 planets including Pluto. In 2006, NASA reclassified Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet. In other words, Pluto is no longer considered as one of the planets orbiting the sun. Thus, this shows that facts that we know at the moment may not be the same in the future. However, truth will always be true for an eternity. And that is what Philosophy tries to do; to seek for the truth.

Critical. Mind-blowing. Speechless.

Those are the words to describe this course. As the name suggests, a lot of contemporary moral issues were covered in this course. Some of the topics include: Euthanasia, Homosexuality, HIV & AIDS, Environmental Ethics, Censorship, Cloning and Death Sentence.

I had a lot fun learning these issues. We discussed the ethical issues by looking at both ends; the arguments for and against the issue. Take Environmental Ethics for instance. We had to look at both Anthropocentric Perspective (favours human) and Ecocentric Perspective (favours nature) in order to come up with a conclusion. However the most interesting part of this course was, each person was entitled to their own opinions. We were not forced to subscribe to one's view. Each person might have different opinions on an issue at the end of the lesson, and that was fine. As long as we learnt to tolerate and respect each others' views on that matter.