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Using “ethics labs” to set a framework for ethical discussion in an undergraduate science course
Author(s) -
Smith Kelly,
Wueste Daniel,
Frugoli Julia
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
biochemistry and molecular biology education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.34
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1539-3429
pISSN - 1470-8175
DOI - 10.1002/bmb.94
Subject(s) - curriculum , engineering ethics , set (abstract data type) , information ethics , mandate , applied ethics , psychology , pedagogy , computer science , engineering , political science , law , programming language
Teaching ethics across the curriculum is a strategy adopted by many universities. One of the fundamental aims of teaching ethics across the curriculum is to get students to see ethics as truly relevant to the subjects they are studying. Ideally, students will come to see that ethics is a thread woven deeply in the fabric of all knowledge and practice. The standard approach, in which students are required to take a separate ethics course, is not especially well suited to this task, but incorporating ethics into science courses presents significant challenges and is likely to meet with resistance, if only because professors in the sciences are often untrained in the teaching of ethics. In an effort to raise the standard of science education as well as comply with a university‐wide curricular mandate, we as a team developed the concept of an “ethics lab.” We discuss the design of the exercises done during laboratory sections, the training of the graduate students who run the exercises, and the iterations of the exercises over time. We report unanticipated rapid positive outcomes of an attempt to integrate ethics education into a sophomore/junior level science course, Introduction to Genetics.