This post is about an experiential education course I redesigned and have taught two times at UNC-Chapel Hill (Fall ‘20 and ‘21). As an experiential course, it involves frequent interactions with community partners. As a seminar, it involves sustained study of normative ethics, democratic theory, and pre-college pedagogy. To give you a sense of the range of possibilities for experiential offerings in philosophy distinct from this one, I’ll mention two other examples:
- I have also designed and taught an experiential education course on intergenerational philosophy (entitled “Philosophy Across the Lifespan”) in which UNC undergraduates engage in philosophical dialogue with older adults in our local community.
- Universities across the country offer philosophy courses in which undergraduates prepare for and participate in the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (this is an example of an experiential education course that is not essentially community-facing, and so not “service-learning”).
In the course I’ll discuss here (“Ethics Bowl and Democratic Deliberation”), UNC undergraduates coached and advised high school Ethics Bowl students across the country. To put the bottom line up front, there are two takeaways I would like to share:
- This course is replicable and adaptable. The exact details will vary from case to case, but the basic contours of my course can be used as the basis for different forms of engagement with Ethics Bowl (e.g. Middle School Ethics Bowl coaching and High School Ethics Bowl coaching, in person or virtually) and more generally for other community-engaged courses in philosophy.
- This course is layered. This class is an opportunity for undergraduates to learn about and apply philosophical ethics through case-based reasoning. It is also an opportunity for undergraduates to help high school students learn about and apply philosophical ethics through case-based reasoning. The element of community partnership creates yet more layers of course design and content: engagement with high school students is an occasion to learn and practice the skill of facilitation; and Ethics Bowl as an activity invites reflection on the philosophical underpinnings of our democracy and the civic aims of education.
I’m very fortunate to teach in the Philosophy Department at UNC-Chapel Hill, which is home to the Parr Center for Ethics and, by extension, the National High School Ethics Bowl. Ethics Bowls come in different shapes and sizes, but here is one pithy description of the activity:
An ethics bowl is a competitive yet collaborative event in which students discuss timely real-life ethical issues. In each round of competition, teams take turns analyzing ethical cases and responding to questions and comments from another team and a panel of judges. (Source: https://nhseb.unc.edu)
In the past, students enrolled in this course served as coaches for the local North Carolina High School Ethics Bowl. In the face of a pandemic preventing us from working with schools in person, I worked closely with my colleague and National High School Ethics Bowl Director, Alex Richardson, to reimagine the community-facing dimension of the course. In a word, I went virtual with service-learning. During this time I helped launch the NHSEBBridge pilot program, whose aim is to promote equity and access within the National High School Ethics Bowl and within our education system more broadly. Through NHSEBBridge, UNC undergraduates served as coaches and advisors to participating high schools across the country who were new to the activity, culminating in an all-virtual competition event. Along the way, my students also provided real-time feedback to other high school teams and students across the country by planning and administering NHSEBAcademy pedagogy clinics and by holding regular NHSEBStudio office hours.
The important takeaway is that this approach is adaptable. No matter where your university resides, there are opportunities to get involved with existing Ethics Bowl events (whether middle school or high school), to help start a new regional competition in your area, and, most importantly, to use the activity’s deliberative format and case studies to facilitate ethical reflection in K-12 schools and across the lifespan.
The Toolkit Approach
Finally, I would like to highlight a central feature of my course design that might be of interest to someone hoping to offer a course like this one. I call it the Toolkit Approach.
Ethics Bowl provides a deliberative format for case-based reasoning about ethics. Competition cases cover almost every aspect of our practical lives, ranging from the mundane and interpersonal to the watershed historical and political issues of our time. There are different approaches one might take to teaching others how to reason through these cases. For my part, I reject the reductive view according to which moral reasoning is nothing more than the rote and mindless application of a menu of theories to concrete circumstances. That’s not only an impoverished view of ethical theory and its history, it’s also bad pedagogy. Theory alone will not provide the situational discernment required to identify morally relevant features in complex situations and to make sound ethical judgments about them. So, I take what I call the Toolkit Approach.
The Toolkit Approach provides students with a repertoire of concepts, distinctions, and frameworks drawn from centuries of philosophical inquiry into ethics. These are conceptual resources that illuminate and complexify ethical dilemmas, rather than solving them in a straightforward or algorithmic way. These notions come in many shapes and sizes: some are methodological (e.g. “veil of ignorance”); some are distinctions (e.g. “instrumental vs. intrinsic value,” “varieties of egalitarianism”); some are general notions that show up in different ways in different normative ethical frameworks (e.g. “impartiality,” “moral standing”); and some are more domain specific (e.g. “evidentiary standards,” “nudging”).
There is more to say about why the Toolkit Approach is both philosophically plausible and pedagogically valuable (if you’re interested, you can view a talk I gave at APPE where I go into greater detail), but I will simply add one caveat: I think it would be a mistake to be so particularistic in our approach to ethical reasoning that we jump straight into the cases without providing students a conceptual vocabulary with which to navigate ethical dilemmas and a shared language with which to disagree. That is to say, there isan important and necessary role for normative ethical theory in a course like this, even for those of us who reject the “merely applied ethics” model of case-based reasoning.
During the first part of the course (entitled “Crash Course in Normative Ethics”), I strategically pair ethical toolkit notions with past Ethics Bowl cases in order to inculcate the Toolkit Approach from day one. Reasoning about cases and learning about ethical theory in tandem facilitates the student’s own process of reflective equilibrium, whereby they are prompted time and again to revise and revisit their general ethical commitments in light of their intuitions and concrete moral judgments (and vice versa). To cite one example, an Ethics Bowl case about disciplinary practices in schools (Case #9 in this set) can provide an occasion for introducing competing theories of the justification of punishment, along with their broadly deontological and consequentialist foundations.
The Toolkit Approach extends beyond normative ethics to the theory and practice of pre-college pedagogy and facilitation. Early in the semester, I introduce my students to tried and tested pedagogical practices developed by practitioners of pre-college philosophy, including most prominently the notion of a community of philosophical inquiry from Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret Sharp. Over the course of the semester they also produce a range of pedagogical resources which serve as assignments in the course: an annotated Ethics Bowl case, a presentation on a case to the class, and a capstone assignment entitled “Ethics in School” (I’ve included some of the assignment details directly in the syllabus document for your use and adaptation). Given the need to pack so much into one semester, I have distilled many of the core skills associated with effective facilitation into Coaching Toolkit notions that are distributed across class sessions, just as the Ethical Toolkit and Case Study pairings are. Each day students are introduced to these notions (usually with an accompanying handout or slides) and given the opportunity to see how they show up in practice, often with the help of structured in-class activities that promote dialogue and that create opportunities for peer-to-peer facilitation.
When I teach this course and others like it, I like to conclude with a unit on democratic theory and philosophy of education. Ethics Bowl as an activity invites us to reflect on the foundational ideals of liberal democracy, the norms that should govern disagreement within it, and the kind of education fit for ensuring its continuity, stability, and success. In my view, a course like this puts bedrock democratic ideals into practice by contributing to the moral and civic education of folks across the country and across the lifespan. In this way, it serves as a testament to the public character and purpose of higher education.
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Michael Vazquez
Michael Vazquez is Teaching Assistant Professor and Director of Outreach in the Department of Philosophy and the Parr Center for Ethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A specialist in Ancient Greek & Roman Philosophy, he received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2020.
