UGSC Proposal
Expanded Ethics Pilot Project for HUM 20x Courses
Pulliam – 4/23/2019
Approximately 2 years ago, the UGSC’s Core Curriculum Assessment Committee under the leadership of Rebecca Steffenson conducted a review during IPRO Day of students’ proficiencies in the objectives established for the Core Curriculum by the Undergraduate Studies Committee. These objectives were based on the university’s existing strategic plan at the time.
One of those objectives reads as follows:
(In concert with and complementing core learning objectives within the various degree programs, the Core Curriculum contributes significantly to IIT's overall goal that its graduates)
Collaborate professionally and ethically, able to:
· Work successfully with others within and across disciplines and cultures.
· Identify and discuss ethical issues.
The IPRO Day review clearly demonstrated to reviewers that our students were not able to “Identify and discuss ethical issues,” while the other Core objectives were much more routinely met. Upon being presented with this information, the Undergraduate Studies Committee commissioned a subcommittee to explore improving education in ethics for our undergraduate students.
While that subcommittee is continuing to work on this issue, one of the most prominent ideas to have emerged during its first meeting is that students should get exposure to ethical education both within and outside of their major programs.
Toward that latter end, I asked Elisabeth Hildt and Kelly Laas of the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions to meet with me last fall about possibly incorporating an Ethics Module into HUM 20x courses, and in an unrelated meeting that I had with Tobias Fuchs one day, I mentioned this to him, as he is very interested in the topic of ethics and ethics education.
Toby indicated that he would like to try creating and incorporating such a module into his HUM 200 class for the Spring term of 2019. He did so, and in late March I observed his class engaging in this module with what both Toby and I believe was a great amount of success—student response forms taken in class afterward confirmed that students agreed with this belief.
The structure of Toby’s two-class-period module is as follows:
· The first day, Toby came in with an ethical case based on a play. He talked about the play with the class as a whole, then split them into small groups to seek out all the various ethical questions that they could find. Then he had each group report on what they found to the class as a whole, and held a class discussion.
· For the second day, he asked them to bring in an ethical case from their own academic fields. He chose about five and assigned each one to a small group and had them—once again—discuss and list all of the various ethical issues that they could find in each case. Then he had each group report to the class as a whole, and there was a whole class discussion.
· Finally, he asked students to fill out a questionnaire on how they felt about the 2-day exercise.
Elisabeth, Kelly and I support expanding this pilot project to a few more sections of HUM 20x in the Fall of 2019 and/or the Spring of 2020—on a voluntary basis by instructors—in order to gather more information and to create more options WRT a possible across-the-board implementation of the Ethics Module in all HUM 20x courses at some point in the not-too-distant future.
Our reasoning for including this module in the HUM 20x courses, is that these courses are a “hard” requirement for all Illinois Tech undergraduates, so locating the Ethics Module in them would insure that the great majority of our students would be exposed to it (students transferring in credit for HUM 20x would not, unfortunately).
I am requesting that the UGSC pass the following resolution today:
The UGSC endorses the ethics module pilot project for HUM 20x courses, and requests that, if feasible, the Humanities department allow the extension of this successful pilot project among any willing instructors of HUM 20x courses in the Fall of 2019 and the Spring of 2020.