Catherine Connolly

Team Members:  Jessica Bryski, Susanna Goodin, WMST students

Women's Studies Program

The purpose of the grant is to consider how to enhance the Women's Studies internship requirement through the addition of an ethics component.   Exposure to the concepts and tools of ethics can help Women's Studies students grapple with the moral issues they are confronted with during internships, or at least better understand and conceptualize them.  Lindemann's Feminist Ethics will be assigned as reading and will be accompanied by a reading guide and thought provoking questions.  Pragmatic questions will be formulated for each intern so she or he may more clearly see how ethical principles immediately relate to her or his work.

Peg Garner

English

The goal of this project is to develop applied ethics content for English 4010, Technical Writing in the Professions.  English 4010 reaches a broad audience.  Most of the students are on the verge of beginning their working careers, which is a prime time for them to be thinking about ethical issues.  Technical communication is an area where ethical issues often arise, so this class is an ideal place to discuss these issues.  To achieve this goal, an ethics component will be added to current assignments.

Linda Kidwell

Team Member:
Penne Ainsworth

Accounting

The Accounting Department has developed a new capstone course, Accounting Ethics and Professionalism, that is designed to give students the technical knowledge to understand scenarios where ethical dilemmas arise.  Funds from the Kaiser grant will be used to improve the course format, taking into account current frustrations, successes, and information gathered from additional research and conference participation.

Pamela Langer

Team members:  Randy Lewis, Isak Nti Asare

Molecular Biology

Issues surrounding the use of molecular genetic diagnostics and gene therapy are clearly ethical in nature.  The project's goal is to increase students' exposure to ethical dilemmas in molecular genetics and start them on the path of dealing with these issues from a rational, informed base.  The content of four courses will be revised to introduce ethical issues.  The grant will also help to develop exercises in ethical analysis, to identify student resources, and to create a website.

Beth Loffreda

Team Members:  Students enrolled in ENGL 5560

English

A new course, MFA Workshop in Non-Fiction:  Dimensions of Narrative Non-Fiction, will be offered in 2007-2008.  Ethical considerations will be at the center of the course:  what does is mean to represent another, and how does one do it well?  How do we decide what to tell and what not to tell?  What, or who, do we write for?  The grant will provide funding for local and regional writing projects of students in the course, material purchases, and course preparation.

Mark Lyford

Team Members:  Diane Gorski

Biology Program

The grant will be used to develop an ethics component to BIOL 1010, a course with an enrollment of approximately 700 students per year from a wide variety of majors.  The new ethics content will focus on introducing the concept of ethics and ethical theory, increasing knowledge and recognition of moral issues, applying recognition and analysis of moral concepts and principles, and improving outcomes related to ethical decision making.

Mona Schatz

Team Members:  Vicki Murdock, James Smith, Liz Dole-Izzo, Tisa Sucher

Social Work

Using a team of social work faculty, the group will examine the ethics of care, creating a portfolio or series of ethics vignettes that examine a major ethical principle of practice, namely, the principle of Do No Harm.  This ethical principle will be examined in three different professional settings.  This series of ethical case vignettes will examine the reasoning that should be considered by the social worker in all ethical decision making.  These ethical case vignettes will be used in a variety of social work practice courses.

Mariah Tanner Ehmke

Agriculture and Applied Economics

The project's primary goal is to bring ethics content back to the economics, applied economics, and agribusiness curriculums.  The agribusiness capstone course will be the main focus of the new ethics material that will be created.  Economic experiments will be developed as active-learning tools to teach ethics content.  A graduate student will be involved in the formulation of ethics-related experiments and course content.  The grant will also allow a nationally respected guest speaker to bring ethics to the forefront of the College of Agriculture.