12.1. Introduction
As researchers in an ethics center, my colleague and I were recently required to update our institutional review board (IRB) training online, the renewal of which is mandated every three years. As we were making our way through bland text and staid examples, we realized that we were not really internalizing any of the lessons. It was not that the screens were conveying information that was useless; rather, it was being delivered in a way that did not resonate with our situations and experiences. Instead of cultivating a passion for ethical practice and culture, it was driving us to click through the boxes as quickly as possible to âget through it and renew it.â It occurred to us that if academic institutions wanted to inculcate the practice of ethics into researchersâ and scholarsâ everyday approach toward their fields and their work, a connection between ethical theory and practice needed to be made through the use of experiential teaching methods that link theoretical grounding to the lived experiences of the learners. Niemi [2015], in his paper âSix Challenges for Ethical Conduct in Science,â echoes that thinking, stating:
It is our intent to explore ways of teaching and learning ethics that do encourage the subject matter to âsink in,â ensuring that lessons are better understood, retained, and carried out in practice as students progress in their careers.
The field of research ethics is complex and spans the responsible conduct of research, including human subjects protection, the ethical treatment of animals, and ethical use of research to benefit the greater good and avoid harm to others. The need for the creation of an ethical culture spans all fields and departments, regardless of discipline or institutional setting. Thus, this piece has applicability to all fields that have ethical components, be they social or natural science disciplines that date back thousands of years, or newer sciences that are emerging and being established as new fields of study.
For this chapter we were asked to write about how to think about educating researchers on ethics in the new field. We envisioned this as the opportunity to start from scratch, thinking about some of the current work we have been involved in and coupling this with educational literature to ground it. In creating a new area of study, such as the geosciences, it is desirable to develop an internal culture of ethical behavior, as well as an ethical outlook on global problems. Knowledge and selfâunderstanding of participants is also needed in addition to content and pedagogy. In cultivating this internal culture of ethical behavior, we will explore how the use of experiential teaching methods achieves those aims. In this essay we will first discuss learning theory and how the experiences of graduate students and academics influence how they will act and behave. This chapter will then examine various methods for teaching ethics by reviewing both current practice and literature. We will conclude with insight from our work at the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE) and provide recommendations on the teaching of ethics education.
The modern educational system in the United States, and much of the world, can be characterized as a triâlevel system of elementary, secondary, and higher education. Elementary and secondary schooling is mandatory for all children in the United States, while higher education is reserved for a subset of those who graduate from secondary school. Prior to this system, which has been in effect for about 150 years, there were schools and tutors, but they were often limited to a very small minority of either promising students or children of the elite.
Today when we discuss how best to teach something, we often think of this triâlevel system and a setting with an expert who controls the time, content, and delivery of information. Educational debate often centers on discussions of how best to use the time, what content should be conveyed, or how to deliver the information.
An area that is discussed far less frequently is how people learn most effectively, not just within a prescribed school setting but overall. There are other ways of thinking about education beyond the modes of learning that occur inside of compulsory education. One of these is what Lave and Wenger [1991] refer to as legitimate peripheral participation, which focuses on the learning that occurs within a social setting, whether hierarchical or peer. An individual who is a novice is placed in a situation with one or more experts, and through observation and practice over time begins to become an expert. This approach has been a timeâhonored tradition as an apprenticeship model for blacksmiths, woodworkers, printers, and other tradespeople, as well as professionals such as physicians. While we may see this method of learning as a remnant of the past, parents raise their children in this manner by modeling behavior and expecting their progeny to follow their example. Teachers are also trained using an apprenticeâtype model, whereas they observe master teachers during their first few years of training, and nearing graduation, take over a classroom for a semester or more under the guidance of a master teacher. Professional academics also go from novice graduate student to master professor over their careers, through observation of advisors, participation in research, and peer interaction.
This layering, building, or scaffolding of knowledge has been an area of study for educational psychologists for many years. Attempting to understand how knowledge is âbuiltâ has been a grea...
