Did I do good?”: The teaching and learning of ethics.
We often assume that students will simply understand specific ethical requirements as they progress, but in reality such “learning by ‘osmosis’” (Bicknell, 1985, p. 25) does not happen. Students need instruction in ethics. With adherence to the Tri-Council’s ethics policy now mandatory for university research with human participants, understanding of ethics is a necessity (The Expert Panel on Research Integrity, 2010). We need students to be empowered to understand and appreciate ethics.
Workshop Structure:In this reflective-practice workshop based on teaching experience, after a brief introduction to the issues there will be an interactive session with students from past
Ethics for Psychology courses who will discuss their course experiences and their progress from basic intrinsic ethical thinking to more explicit, fuller understanding. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions; e.g., what the students think students need, or what works to facilitate understanding of ethics.
Participants then themselves engage in a classroom-type interactive discussion of a situation/scenario and applicable ethical principles. Participants first break out into small groups to discuss a specific scenario, then engage again as whole group for further discussion.
Finally, participants collaborate to design a similar scenario which could be used in their own classes.
Learning Objectives:As outcomes of this workshop, participants should be able to:
- describe concepts underlying ethics and relate these to teaching.
- review with students necessity for concepts of ethics and codes.
- discuss a student perspective of ethics.
- describe benefits of an active learning approach to ethics.
- develop their own in-class exercises to discuss ethics with students.
Teaching of ethics can be lecture-based, but discussion of situations and application of principles leads to fuller engagement and deeper understanding by students (Plante, 1998). This workshop illustrates the discussion and engagement model of application of ethics to aid student understanding of ethical principles and codes.
