I have always cared about making the connection between the classroom and the world abundantly clear for my students, who sometimes express the sentiment that their philosophy education feels abstract, detached, or removed in some way from the world of everyday life.
Particularly for ethics courses, I think a lot about the balance between theory and practice. Learning different ethical theories helps to give us frameworks for grounding our thought, but it also seems possible to get too deep into conceptual weeds in a way that does not genuinely add to our students’ growth as critical thinkers and ethical agents.
The current context in which I teach makes some of these questions feel more pressing. I currently teach Healthcare Ethics for a community college population. The majority of students take my course as a prerequisite for entering some healthcare professional track, such as nursing. My students are going into positions where they will be doing invaluable care work. They will be responsible for treating their patients justly, kindly, and with an eye toward enhancing their autonomy and well-being. I find it critically important to treat ethics in this context as something we embody and to teach it in a way that adds to their ability to genuinely integrate deeper ethical thought and behavior into their lived experience.
One easy choice for me in designing this course was to completely nix my unit on metaethics. Questions about the grounding of ethical claims are philosophically interesting, but in a class geared toward healthcare professionals, these questions would be an inefficient use of our limited time. We can come to the course with a common-sense view of morality as something that matters and gives us reasons to act, and this is enough for our purposes. This allows us to focus on pressing issues with practical significance to their lives.
I do still include a unit on moral theory at the beginning of the term, and I subsequently cover a selection of applied issues from biomedical ethics. I intend to teach topics that relate to students’ lives, but do I teach these topics in a way that helps my students to see this connection, and to improve as moral thinkers and ethical agents? This is a work in progress, and I hope for my reflections on these values and how they connect to teaching strategies can serve as a starting point for further conversations.
One strategy I implement is an open-ended final paper (I give credit to Mark Balawender for sharing his final paper assignment with me, which I drew inspiration from in designing the project). Instead of providing a set of fixed topics for students to write on, I allow my students to select their own topic on anything relevant to the field of healthcare ethics. I provide a long list of ideas to get them started, but these ideas are not as detailed as full-fledged prompts, and they are permitted to move beyond this list (and even beyond the applied topics explicitly addressed in class or in any of the assigned readings). I initially worried about (a) increasing students’ burden of decision-making and giving them the challenging work of determining the appropriate scope for an introductory-level philosophy paper, and (b) the possibility that their topic selection would not be sufficiently relevant to the goals for the class and for the paper and that it will steer them off track from developing mastery of the course content.
To combat both worries, I have incorporated an extensive peer-review process from the brainstorming to the drafting phases that take place over more than half of each semester. I begin so early in the semester because many of my students have never written a college-level paper before at all, and they need time to learn the entire process (from brainstorming, to refining their focus, to researching, to outlining, and drafting). The first step is a structured assignment through which they brainstorm possible topic ideas. Students workshop their topics with their peers to refine their initial nuggets of ideas and turn them into structured research questions with the requisite scope for an introductory-level paper.
After the brainstorming phase is complete and my students have settled on their topics, they are instructed on how to begin the research and writing process. I encourage them to reach out for individualized help during this phase. Many do not, which is a concern because there is a lot that happens between choosing an initial topic and producing a final paper. So, in addition, I also require that a full draft be turned in well before the actual final paper is due. This helps motivate students to be proactive about their writing process. It also allows me to give individualized writing feedback even to those students who do not reach out for a one-on-one meeting. Adding even more steps (such as an additional step between topic selection and a full draft) to the peer-review process could be a valuable addition to future courses, as I have seen students struggle with the research phase as well as with establishing a clear structure.
I chose to implement this assignment so that I could continue to build students’ skills in critical thinking and written communication, while also encouraging them to individualize the material so that it is relevant to their own lived experiences. I have seen a good deal of success with the implementation of this project. For example, I never would have known that one of my students had been serving as a birth doula for years, and she wrote a wonderful paper arguing for a moral imperative that these services be incorporated into state-funded insurance policies to combat unjust disparities in OB/GYN care. Another student did her paper about the rights of her patients to refuse ADL (activities of daily living) care. We had a one-on-one meeting in which I listened to her explain her thoughts about when her patients refused their ADLs. I continued to ask questions to encourage her to subject her view to philosophical scrutiny and to help scaffold a translation between her initial thoughts and the principles we had covered in the course, which connected to the difference between strong and weak paternalism and the balance between autonomy and beneficence. I could give many more examples of fantastic papers students have written that are directly connected to their own experiences. Many students do struggle with the initial phase of selecting a topic, but through conversations with them, I have observed that going through this helps to deepen their engagement with the course material by requiring them to think long and hard about how our course connects to their own interests, experiences, and/or values.
Though I have stepped outside my comfort zone to experiment with a final paper that is so open-ended, the culminating project of the course being a paper may still seem quite traditional. I have heard that some assign students to create memes, podcasts, or videos, or have shifted to oral projects in lieu of final papers. I am definitely interested in exploring and experimenting with more nontraditional assessment methods to enhance student engagement, but I have been hesitant to adopt them as of yet. I intend for my course to improve students’ written communication skills, so one of my worries is that some of these alternative assessment methods would not track this course outcome particularly well. I also value the ability to create abundantly clear expectations and rubrics for my students, and I worry that I would not know how to do that for something like a podcast. I also like that in the process of paper writing, students gain better familiarity with how to find and read peer-reviewed journal articles. I would love to hear more about what kinds of nontraditional assignments others have tried, and how they have combatted these worries (or even why they may be misplaced).
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Janelle Salisbury
Jenelle Salisbury is currently an adjunct Instructor of Philosophy at Delta College, teaching Healthcare Ethics and Introduction to Ethics. She recently received her PhD from the University of Connecticut, where she taught Philosophy and Social Ethics and Introduction to Philosophy. Her dissertation research was on the unity of consciousness and the first-person perspective. She also has research interests in the ethics of caring and radical empathy.
