SYLLABUS REFLECTION
Health Care Ethics and Society is a sophomore-level course at the Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago. Arrupe is a small associate degree-granting, liberal arts program that serves students locally from Chicago and its outlying suburbs, the majority of whom are the first in their families to attend college. While earning an associate degree, students also complete the general education core requirements of Loyola so that they are ready to transfer internally to another college within the Loyola system (or elsewhere) if they desire to complete their bachelor’s degree. Society, Justice, and Health Care fulfill one of these requirements, and it is typically the second or third philosophy course that students take. The course size is capped at around 24 and meets twice a week for an hour and a half throughout a 16-week semester.
Despite the reference to health care, the course is not an applied ethics course, but rather a social-political philosophy course. While I do cover traditional social and political concepts in class (autonomy, rights, justice, authority, etc.), the primary readings are almost all related directly to healthcare issues. Some of the main goals of the course involve providing students with (1) language to describe and think through their own experiences of health and the healthcare system in the United States, as well as (2) space to develop the skill of care-based and self-critical curiosity in relation to those experiences and that of others they learn about throughout the term. Students complete a number of smaller assignments designed to help them practice curiosity skills they need to engage in a larger project which culminates in a Health Care Justice Fair that is open to the whole of the college as well as to their friends and families.
In terms of course design, I am generally interested in questioning the skill vs. content binary that often frames discussions about learning outcomes and course pedagogies. One small way that I shift my thinking deliberately is by asking myself what a specific skill has to do with the specific content and the content with the skill. This helps me to frame both in terms of one another and facilitates students’ ability to describe more clearly what they are learning in terms of what they are doing. A question template for this sort of idea is something like: What role does [primary skill for the course] play when thinking about [content, theme, or unit]?
For Health Care Ethics and Society, some of the questions that students work with are: Does curiosity play a role in caring well or badly? What does curiosity have to do with human rights? What kinds of curiosity are needed to pursue justice? Taking inspiration from Merritt Rehn-DeBraal and others, students learn about curiosity and, as Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett describe, some different ways of being curious. Students then practice different styles of curiosity in relation to course readings and topics in and outside of class, both individually and as small groups throughout the semester. For example, after watching a short documentary on How Health Care Makes Disability a Trap, students brainstorm ways in which curiosity is and is not displayed well and poorly by the various people and institutions included in the film. That sets the stage for assignments that require students to begin practicing curiosity themselves about their own healthcare worlds and those of others that they choose to learn about.
For their large, whole-semester project, students learn about healthcare justice issues related to various social identities by choosing from a curated list of article options that I provide (topics currently deal mostly with disability, immigration, race, and gender). The unique combinations and perspectives that result are then funneled into a final project that asks students to provide an opportunity for others to become curious about the issues they have studied. The Health Care Justice Fair ideally results in students acting as playful teachers of others who visit their “curiosity stations” (e.g., as opposed to posters that report the results of research).
One major change that I will be implementing in the next version of this course is in the assessment methodology. In place of traditional grading, I will be trying out a method that takes some inspiration from Dustin Locke’s “Levels System” and specifications grading. Last, I want to invite those who have recommendations for improvement or any questions to reach out at gtarantino at luc dot edu. Here is the syllabus, minus some of the typical university-required boilerplate information.
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Giancarlo Tarantino
Giancarlo Tarantino is a Clinical Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago. His research interests are in hermeneutics, Aristotle, and pedagogy, as well as their intersection. He will begin serving as Chair of the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy in July 2024.
