| Summary: | The aim of the research is to map teacher’s observations regarding her students’ moral development during a project based learning module. I am interested in project based learning and the possibilities it can offer outside of the subject matter. Through my own teaching experiences, I have seen projects offer not only learning results but also joy of learning. In this research I am however focusing on moral development. In the research I aim to bring the teacher’s observations to the limelight; what she had noticed during the different phases of the project from planning to evaluation. This research finds out how she purposefully influenced her students’ moral, but also what unconscious impacts she had on them. The methodology of this research is case study in the context of a third-grade classroom in the Northern Finland. The research follows the seven steps of Kvale that are built around interview data. With the help of the data I investigate the teacher’s experiences of project based learning and simultaneous moral growth of the students. The data is divided under three research questions which cast light on what moral and value education the teacher wanted to provide for her students, what kind of moral issues spontaneously rose as the project went on, and how the students have demonstrated their moral growth after the project has ended. According to cognitive moral development theory, we need to have a sufficient moral understanding of a certain topic before we can understand the moral aspects of it and that way develop our moral understanding. Project based learning seems to offer great grounds for moral development as the project starts with the students getting to know their topic with real-life learning situations. Once they possess sufficiently knowledge on subject content matter, the teacher can introduce moral questions and dilemmas to the students to ponder. In project based learning students work with various individuals and that way cannot avoid encountering different opinions and moral dilemmas ...
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