Research ethics in education is a challenging topic to teach and to learn. As the staff and student body in UK higher education and elsewhere diversifies, the challenges increase as shared reference points diminish. My teaching reflections focus on a key tension explored in this article: how the imperative of internationalising the curriculum conflicts with hegemonic codes of conduct regarding research ethics that seem resistant to change. The framework of threshold concepts is applied to the teaching and learning of research ethics in education not, as is usual, to identify such concepts, but to draw attention to the critical role of the intersection between learner and curriculum and how institutional expectations need to be re-appraised.