Abstract:

The aim of our article is to show the connection between the requirements of contemporary university education and the normative-ethical component, which should accompany the personal and professional life of the actors involved. The paper aims to highlight through a narrative-critical approach the experiences lived at the department level to find new ways to access the game of power and culture in the contemporary educational context. In this respect, the paper emphasizes relevant experiences and reflections of the teaching experience at the master’s program in the academic years 2018-2021 at the Polytechnic University of Timișoara in Romania.

As part of teaching ”Ethics and Academic Integrity” (EAI) we are trying to answer the following questions: ”What is the relevance of the EAI discipline for undergraduate and master's studies?”, ”What are the teaching and assessment methods of the EAI?” and ”What are the practical challenges we have to face in the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic and in general?”

Thus, we intend to use a qualitative-narrative tool, the autoethnographic method, which was used by several representative authors (Denzin, 1997; Goodall, 2000; Pelias, 2004; Warren, 2009; Băiaș, 2014), generally in the field of social sciences and specifically in the field of communication sciences. We start from the idea that autoethnography is a narrative method of investigation, ”methodology of academic investigation that not only acknowledges the speaking, theorizing researcher but also centers him or her in an effort to illuminate how the experiences of that self are representative of (and in some cases constitutive of) larger social systems” (Warren, 2009, 68) therefore this method is a useful one in the communication research and through it one can ”interconnect” the personal with the professional, without trying to find out the truth, only to understand the major social systems. The unification between auto and ethnography, i.e., between self and culture leads to a characteristic of autoethnography namely to criticize the condition of the culture in which the social actor is positioned.

Unlike other approaches, our paper highlights through the autoethnographic method, i.e., a qualitative critical-narrative investigation, the realities faced by the actors involved and helps to better understand of the specific socio-cultural context on different levels: (a) the implementation of a new discipline in the master’s cycle program, the manner of teaching or the content of the syllabus; (b) new challenges, such as the evaluation forms appropriate to Ethics and Academic Integrity discipline in the (pre)Covid-19 context, the reporting of deviations from the internal code of ethics by master’s students or the manner of warning the potential problems of members from the academic community; (c) and giving specific proposals for improving university management on issues of institutional academic ethics.

Keywords:

Ethics, academic integrity, education, master, autoethnography.