0.1 Eac toolkit instructor module: practical and professional ethics  (Page 3/5)

Short bibliography on moral development and ethics skills

• Kohlberg, Lawrence. 1981. The Philosophy of Moral Development: Essays on Moral Development , vol.1. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
• Pritchard, Michael S. 1996. Reasonable Children: Moral Education and Moral Learning . Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press: 11.
• Rest, James, Narvaez, Darcia, Bebeau, Muriel, and Thoma, Stephen. 1999. Postconventional Moral Thinking: a Neo-Kohlbergian Approach . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
• Huff, Chuck and Frey, William. 2005. "Moral Pedagogy and Practical Ethics" in Science and Engineering Ethics 11 (3): 394-397.
• Cruz, Jose and Frey, William. 2003. "An Effective Strategy for Integrating Ethics Across the Curriculum in Engineering: An ABET 2000 Challenge" in Science and Engineering Ethics 9 (4): 546-547.

Instructional / pedagogical strategies

Which pedagogical or instructional strategies are used or suggested for this module. (For example: Discussion/Debate, Decision-Making Exercise, Presentation, Dramatization or Role Playing, Group Task, Formal or Informal Writing, Readings, among others)

This module employs the following pedagogical strategies:

• General Class Discussion : Students read the scenarios and answer the questions. Then the instructor engages the class in a discussion of the first scenario. Taking the pre-test before the discussion "primes the pump" so to speak. It gets students thinking about ethics and computing and thus readies them for a productive discussion.
• Cooperative Learning : If the instructor has time, he or she can organize small group discussions of the scenarios in the Pre-Test. Students can be asked to reach an agreement on their assessment of a scenario, debrief to the instructor and the class, and reflect on the process of how they reached agreement. If they fail to reach agreement, they can be asked to reflect on the obstacles to consensus. Thus, students engage in cooperative learning and reflect on the dynamics of small group interaction.
• Eliciting Knowledge : With practice, the instructor leading the Pre-Test exercise can learn to elicit knowledge from students during the discussion. Certain phrase that students use "encode" the moral schemas we have developed to make sense of situations and help us recognize and respond to the moral aspects of our situations. In a section below, there is a list of student comments and a discussion of how these comments tie into certain ethics tests and the underlying ethical approaches. Students can become aware of ethics by, paradoxically, being led to see that they are already thinking ethically. This recognition of embedded ethical thought is a powerful tool for generating ethical awareness in students.
• Critical Thinking : This module can also be used to promote critical thinking skills. The discussion leader can underscore and classify the argument techniques students are using through metacomments. (E.g., You are making a use of analogical argumentation by comparing sending e-mails with making phone conversations.") The discussion leader can also make just-in-time suggestions to students on how to formulate their arguments by helping them to see the relation between premises and conclusions, distinguishing the empirical and value components of ethical arguments, and discussing the difference between emotional and rational persuasion. Doing this through just-in-time insertions requires practice and patience but this exercise is an effective means to carry out these objectives.
• Structured Discussion : Ethics tests (reversibility, publicity, harm) are introduced into the second half of this exercise to provide students with aids in structuring their discussion of ethical issues and in making ethical arguments and justifications. The students discuss a scenario without the tests; then they discuss a scenario with the ethics tests. When asked to reflect on the two experience, they begin to see how ethical approaches can help us to hold structured and orderly conversations about even contentious ethical issues.
• Pre-Module Skills : This module is an introductory exercise designed to build basic skills in moral reasoning and judgment. As such it can be used at an introductory level with little or no advanced preparation. In fact, this activity has, as was mentioned above, been used as an assessment tool to gain a rough idea of where students are in their moral development. Using Kohlberg's scale of moral development, students can be roughly located in terms of pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional moral development by listening carefully to the kinds of justifications they provide for their positions vis a vis the scenarios.