Abstract
Abstract. This study qualitatively examines how teachers in Kazakhstan approach value education, focusing on how they implicitly position the source of values, the student’s role in the process, and the pedagogical purposes such education serves in everyday classroom practice. In this research, value education is considered not as the application of specific activities and techniques, but as a form of pedagogical positioning that guides the teacher's classroom decisions. The research was conducted within the framework of a phenomenological design; data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 17 primary school teachers selected using maximum diversity sampling. Data were analyzed qualitatively. The findings show that teachers mostly position values as absolute and indisputable truths and largely treat value education as a tool supporting classroom management. The student is predominantly positioned as a passive recipient or an implementer expected to exhibit correct behavior in the value education process; approaches that treat the student as a questioning, justifying, and meaning-constructing subject are limited. Teachers define their roles in values education sometimes as authority figures, sometimes as role models, and sometimes as guides; these roles can vary depending on the context. The findings also show that value education in teacher practice cannot be reduced to a fixed set of methods; instead, it emerges as a dynamic process that is continually reshaped by contextual sensitivity, pedagogical judgement, and teachers’ situational decisions.