Syllabus Showcase: Ethical Issues in Health Care, Megan Dean

This is the most recent version of a healthcare ethics undergraduate course that I’ve been teaching since 2016. I first developed it as a graduate student at Georgetown University, revised it as a postdoc at Hamilton College, and am now teaching it every semester at Michigan State University. It’s been through a lot of revision, and I’ve benefitted from advice from colleagues at each institution.

This version is for 35 people and is taught in person. The students who take this class at Michigan State are usually going into health professions. Many of them are already working in healthcare in some capacity. My central aim is to make the course useful for their lives and careers, rather than to prepare them for further work in philosophy. I do this by providing students with a “toolbox” of philosophical concepts, theories, and approaches that they can use to analyze, evaluate, and critique issues that arise in healthcare settings. We practice communicating these analyses in plain language so that students are equipped to use these tools to advocate for their patients, their loved ones, and themselves in a variety of situations.

Another general aim is to make the course as accessible as possible. The whole course is designed with this in mind, but one of my favorite accessibility strategies is the “free pass” 48-hour extension available to every student (which also cuts down on student emails). I also only assign readings available through the library to make the course more financially accessible.

One of the biggest changes I’ve made to the course is reducing the number of readings. This was originally because of the pandemic, but I found that giving students more time to dig into and master the material makes for a better learning and teaching experience overall.

One thing I like best about the course is the way it is organized around questions. The semester is divided into three modules, each of which answers a question: “How should we do health care ethics?”, “What makes a good clinical encounter?”, and “What makes a good health care system?” At the beginning of each module, I introduce the question and the rest of the module discusses different possible answers. This makes it easy to incorporate a range of perspectives and makes it clear to the students that there is no one right answer to each question. They are asked to think through the strengths and weaknesses of each possible answer, decide which answers are compatible or incompatible with others, and so on.

Organizing the class this way also provides significant flexibility to alter the schedule if needed. This past spring, there was mass violence at MSU early in the semester. I needed to rearrange the second half of the course to accommodate for lost time and for changes in our capacities. This structure made it easier than it would have been otherwise. I am sad and angry that I need to consider this sort of contingency planning in my syllabus design, but given frequent violence in the US and increasing extreme weather events, I believe it is prudent.

I’ve had a lot of positive student feedback about this course. Many students appreciate the course’s pace and that each module follows the same pattern of assignments so they know what to expect and can use feedback to improve their work throughout the semester. The most popular reading is from feminist philosopher of disability Susan Wendell on the “myth of control.” The media reflection assignments are also quite popular; these are discussion board assignments that require students to use a course concept to engage with a news story, blog post, podcast episode, or the like. They get to practice using their philosophical “tools” on a topic that interests them and discuss current events with their classmates.
While I’m generally happy with the course, there are a few things I plan to change moving forward. We discuss reproductive health and trans health care at various points throughout the course, such as when we discuss racial health disparities and intersectional analysis, but I want to incorporate more of a direct focus on these urgent issues. I’m also grappling with AI, as most educators are. I am not yet sure how to manage that without making the class more inaccessible.

The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editors, Dr. Smrutipriya Pattnaik via smrutipriya23@gmail.com, Dr. Brynn Welch via bwelch@uab.edu, or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Alexis LaBar via labaralexis06@gmail.com with potential submissions.

Megan Dean

Megan A. Dean is an assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University. Her research is in feminist bioethics, with a focus on the ethics of eating. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in health care ethics, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of food.