Robert Young's Evaluation Report - 2008

This evaluation will assess the second year of the Kaiser Ethics Project at the University of Wyoming.  The project, having moved through an impressive initial phase, has now completed the selection and orientation of a second cohort of Kaiser Ethics Faculty for 2007/2008. In doing so, it has matured into a richer and more diverse resource for the teaching and learning of ethics within a university setting. Moreover, it has provided a lively forum for the discussion of general issues related to teaching at the undergraduate level.

The project is developing into an excellent means of promoting not only the teaching of applied and professional ethics, but also the exploration of imaginative teaching strategies to engage students in the critical analysis of the content of their college courses.

The Application Process

This year’s grant application process was well-administered.  The application information presented to the UW faculty by the Ellbogen Center for Teaching and Learning (ECTL) was timely, clear, and thoughtfully prepared.  The result was a 37% increase in applications for the Kaiser Ethics Fellowships, from eight applications in 2006 to eleven in 2007.  This year’s applications also represented a broader spectrum of academic disciplines, ranging from nursing and elementary education to anthropology and music.  In addition, the 2007 batch of applications represented a wider gender balance among faculty, with four male faculty members applying compared to just one last year.  These numbers indicate that the program is, after its initial year, becoming more widely known and more appealing to a broader segment of the university’s faculty.  In this regard, it is important to note that the program continues to attract applications from a cross-section of faculty ranks, from assistant to full professor.

The project advisory council met on October 29, 2007, to review the applications.  Council members agreed that all applications were well-written and highly competitive.  After careful and considered deliberation, members chose seven applications for this year’s awards, the majority of which proposed to develop applied ethics components for business and professional courses.

Orientation of the 2007/2008 Kaiser Faculty

The orientation workshop for the second cohort of Kaiser Ethics Faculty was held on November 16, 2007. The workshop was convened by the two project directors, Jane Nelson and Ed Sherline, and included members of the advisory council. The ECTL provided the new grantees with a helpful set of supplementary readings, some available on the Kaiser Project website and others in the form of a packet of articles written by professional experts who discussed the joys and sorrows of teaching ethics to undergraduate students in the 21^st century.

Co-project director Ed Sherline  presented a clear and concise summary of the goals of the project, stressing the importance of the long-range goal of developing a cadre of faculty at the university who will not only serve as a resource for teaching ethics across the curriculum, but who will also be mentors for those faculty who receive ethics grants.

The workshop provided a forum for the new group of faculty to meet each other and to discuss their individual ethics projects. The sessions quickly created a feeling of collegiality within the new cohort of diverse faculty members and established a strong sense of connection to the program.

An additional strength of the orientation meeting was the thorough discussion of the goals of the project within the context of the various academic disciplines represented.  Professor Sherline alleviated anxieties about teaching ethics among faculty who teach discipline-specific courses but who have had little or no experience teaching ethics-centered courses.  He pointed out, for instance, that teaching ethics in courses across the curriculum is, in many regards, more effective and more relevant to students than teaching ethics in a stand-alone course.

The discussion of ways in which instructors in various academic disciplines can teach applied ethics without special training in philosophy or professional ethics was a healthy one.  It provided the new grantees an opportunity, readily seized upon, to move into a broader discussion of pedagogical issues against the backdrop of introducing ethics into existing or proposed courses The excellent summary document, “Reflections on Teaching Ethics: Summer 2007,”  prepared by the co-project directors and available on the Kaiser Ethics Project website, provided a useful tableau of issues that last year’s Kaiser faculty encountered and struggled with during the initial phase of the project.

The document points out, for example, that applied ethics, if well taught, challenges students about deeply held beliefs, and the subject matter often treads on highly sensitive issues.  Therefore, instructors should be prepared for higher levels of student frustration in their ethics-centered courses.  Because the discussion of ethics involves a significant element of ambiguity, many students who are highly practical and tend to see issues in black and white will express frustration at having to labor in the gray zone where much of the discussion of ethical issues takes place.

Professors Sherline and Nelson guided the group through a useful discussion of key issues to consider in developing ethical components of discipline-specific courses.  They stressed the point, for example, that applied/professional ethics cannot be divorced from personal ethics.  Thus, in teaching applied ethics, both the student and the instructor will need to confront and consider issues such as academic dishonesty.  Moreover, applied ethics is also closely related to social and political issues, so such issues need to be carefully integrated into the disciplinary subject matter and not compartmentalized as a separate area of discussion.  In sum, the aim of ethics related courses should be to encourage students in all disciplines and professional programs to become autonomous, critical thinkers.  The goal isn’t necessarily to make students better people, but to help them improve their decision-making and critical thinking abilities regarding ethical issues and moral judgments.

This discussion progressed to a rich and highly productive exploration of broader issues common to teaching any subject matter at the undergraduate level.  Participants agreed unanimously that such discussions were a valuable part of their experience in the Kaiser Ethics Project.

In short, the orientation workshop was a major step toward getting this year’s cohort of Kaiser Faculty off to a good start: it alleviated many anxieties about teaching ethics; it provided useful examples of how ethics can be integrated into discipline-specific courses; and it made a valuable array of both print and online resources available to the new grantees.

Development of a Cadre of Ethics Faculty and Mentors

One of the major aims of the grant proposal to the Kaiser Foundation is the development of a cadre of faculty throughout the university who will be not only leaders in the teaching of ethics across the curriculum, but also mentors for ethics faculty for years to come.

A second workshop, sponsored by the ECTL and convened on February 1, 2008, by Jane Nelson and Ed Sherline, brought together last year’s grantees with this year’s cohort. This workshop was an effective first step toward promoting a lively dialogue between the two cohorts of Kaiser Ethics Faculty and toward creating a model for building a group of experienced and capable ethics faculty over the long term.

The workshop began with a frank and candid discussion by those members of the 2006/2007 cohort about the successes and challenges of their first year of work in developing ethical components for their courses.  The courses under discussion represented a variety of disciplines, from accounting to molecular biology and from agricultural economics to non-fiction writing.

The opportunity for the second cohort of faculty to share in the experiences of the first cohort produced a healthy exploration of practical issues involved in integrating ethics into discipline-specific courses. Also, it also gave rise to a rich and energetic discussion of pedagogical issues involved in teaching at the undergraduate level.

Along with hints about designing ethics-oriented courses (for example, be accurate in the course description regarding the ethical content of the course, and treat ethics as an integral part  of the subject matter), faculty shared some of the lessons learned in their initial efforts.  In the accounting course, for example, it quickly became apparent that the originally envisioned team-teaching approach to ethical issues was not as effective as a single-instructor approach because students generally had difficulty dealing with conflicting points of view between two instructors. In the social work program, faculty members, after discovering they lacked a large body of ethics-related teaching materials, developed an effective set of case studies and ethical vignettes and produced a bibliography of a broad range of ethical literature which can be used by a much wider spectrum of courses in social work.

In the molecular biology department, the challenge of introducing ethical issues in three biochemistry courses led the faculty member to develop a first-rate website containing a rich resource of bioethics links. It also led to the instructor to the realization that in order to do justice to an ethics component she would have to reconcile the need to revise (or even delete) some of her course content in order to find the time for a deeper discussion of ethical issues.

The instructor of a non-fiction writing course noted that her attempt to introduce ethical issues (for example, what are you doing with other people when you write about them?) added a rich and complex dimension to the written work of her students.  As one student in her class remarked, “From my first experience as a writer, I’ve been bound up in ethical considerations, stemming from the fact that the stories I tell are mine and not mine….and yet I have this absolute belief that I can be honest with myself, and honest to the words I write.”

These shared narratives of how members of the first cohort of Kaiser Ethics Faculty went about integrating ethics into their courses, how they modified and redesigned their syllabi, and how their students grappled with ethical issues sparked a wide-ranging and extraordinarily insightful discussion. Both groups of instructors shared pedagogical approaches, teaching strategies, and philosophies of mentoring students in their various disciplines.  

The workshop provided solid evidence that the Kaiser Ethics Project is well on its way to achieving its aim of creating a community of teachers and mentors who are avidly engaged in designing rigorous and imaginative approaches to the challenge of teaching ethics across the university curriculum. All participants expressed their enthusiasm for working with their colleagues in helping students to become critically engaged both in the examination of the lives they lead and in the ways they conduct themselves in the professions they choose.

The final workshop of the year for the 2007/2008 cohort took place on May 19, 2008. Again, this year’s grantees engaged in an energetic discussion of the status of their projects and reported on the successes and challenges inherent in teaching ethics across a wide spectrum of professional and academic courses.  Once more, Ed Sherline and Jane Nelson provided a packet of pertinent readings, and they skillfully steered the conversations toward a thoughtful exchange of ideas regarding both the theory and the practice of teaching ethics.

A remarkable feature of the meeting was the enthusiasm of the participants for their projects and their willingness to consider ways in which several ethics projects might intersect and provide a springboard for students to participate in ethics discussions that would reach across disciplines.  The session resulted in a stimulating cross-fertilization of teaching ideas and practices which led to the recommendation that the Kaiser advisory council consider encouraging interdisciplinary grant application for the coming year.

Overview of Projects to Date

As of this writing, fifteen projects have been funded through the Kaiser Ethics Program.  Five projects have been completed, nine are underway, and one project director resigned from the university.

The completed projects achieved noteworthy results and will continue to provide an ethical dimension to their respective areas of academic and professional emphasis.  In the molecular biology department, for example, the content of three courses was revised to introduce ethical issues into discussions about molecular genetic testing, germ-line genome modification, and somatic gene therapy.  The project also encouraged students to take an active role in developing exercises to promote the discussion of ethical issues.

The project in social work expanded its original focus to include faculty from the nursing and pharmacy programs in creating an interdisciplinary ethics component for the College of Health Sciences, and in accounting the Kaiser grant resulted in a substantially revised and improved senior level capstone course with strong emphasis on applied ethics.

These examples are typical of the imaginative and creative manner in which the Kaiser Ethics Program grants are encouraging UW faculty to develop an on-going core of courses that emphasize applied ethics across the curriculum.

It is also worthy of note that in discussions regarding the design and implementation of ethics related courses all of the Kaiser grantees have an important trait in common. They are highly dedicated to the enterprise, and they all demonstrate a refreshing willingness, in this age of the ubiquitous “student evaluation,” to risk introducing new, difficult, and often controversial subject matter into their courses.

The nine on-going projects, in various stages of development, show substantial promise.  One of the goals of the ethics grant in the College of Agriculture, for example, was to bring a nationally known speaker on agricultural ethics to UW in 2008.  In cooperation with the College of Agriculture and the ECTL, Dr. Pinstrup-Andersen, an internationally renowned agricultural economist, gave the 2008 Kaiser Ethics Lecture in February of this year.  The lecture, “Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy for the Global and National Food Systems,” was an excellent example of the ways in which the collaboration between Kaiser grant recipients and the ECTL is promoting a wider awareness of ethical issues in the formulation of public policy on the UW campus.

Other continuing projects in disability studies, elementary and early childhood education, as well as family and consumer sciences are well underway and on track for classroom implementation in the coming year.

The School of Pharmacy has embarked on an ambitious multidisciplinary approach to teaching ethics across the pharmacy curriculum and has begun to infuse ethical issues into existing courses involving, in one instance, a case-study of assisted suicide.  Additionally, the faculty team will be making ethics-related presentations at a national pharmacy conference in Chicago in July.

A pilot project in the Department of English is in the process of designing readings and essays for College Composition and Rhetoric, a course required of all entering freshmen at the university.  When completed, the project will encourage students to think about the meaning of community in the 21^st century.  This ambitious enterprise also envisions introducing ethics-related material for graduate teaching assistants, who teach the bulk of the courses in the composition program.

And finally, a Kaiser grantee in the department of management and marketing who used some of his grant funds to give a lecture on business ethics at Kuwait University has been invited back to teach an ethics course to MBA students at that university.

The projects funded to date through the Kaiser Ethics Project clearly demonstrate that the goals of the program are being met.  The ethics-oriented courses that have been developed as well as those in the process of development show great promise of providing models for teaching ethics across the curriculum that can be used both on the UW campus and at other universities.

Summary

The Kaiser Ethics Project has made substantial progress toward building an institutional core of ethics faculty who will provide leadership for future ethics- across- the- curriculum programs at UW.  This summary of the results from the 2008 project evaluation indicates:

• The project is well-administered. Grantees indicate a high level of satisfaction with the efforts of the ECTL and the project co-directors. The selection process, the content and design of the workshops, and the contributions of workshop facilitators all indicate effective organization and productive cooperation between the ECTL and the Department of Philosophy.
   
• The project has attracted a strong group of talented and dedicated faculty.  Its ability to recruit new individuals and to retain participants suggests an important value of the project: it is making a contribution to the professional lives of the grantees and creating an important peer learning environment on campus.
   
• The Kaiser Faculty involved in the project are highly motivated and clearly dedicated to the goals of the project.  Their willingness to revise course content and to take risks in the design and delivery of their courses is a major strength of the program.
   

• The grant projects completed to date have demonstrated academic rigor, pedagogical imagination, and a capacity for flexible approaches to the teaching of ethics across the curriculum.  Anecdotal evidence indicates that students who have participated in ethics-oriented courses have gained an appreciation of the importance of an ethical dimension in their personal and professional lives.  In looking to the future, the project directors and the advisory council may want to explore the possibility of designing an instrument to measure student responses to specific ethics content in their courses.

Robert G. Young, Ph.D.
Project Evaluator