The W.A. Franke Honors College at the University of Arizona launched its Civic Leadership Certificate Program (CLC) in Spring 2023. Ethical Leadership, which I originally designed in Fall 2023, is one of the required courses in the program and exposes students to relevant literature and concepts from history, psychology, moral philosophy, and leadership studies. The central aim of the course is to help students develop an understanding of leaders’ moral responsibilities and equip them with the tools of moral reasoning they need to ethically evaluate leaders’ conduct and avoid unethical behavior in their future leadership roles. Like other courses in the CLC, Ethical Leadership emphasizes oral communication skills, collaboration, and project-based learning. Naturally, this means that some assessments in the course are oral presentations and group projects.
Leadership is a multifaceted subject, so when designing the course, I complemented the moral philosophy in the course with other disciplinary perspectives. Some readings trace historical changes in our understanding of leadership, others present specific frameworks for understanding leaders’ roles and duties, and the final unit of the course focuses on the psychological obstacles that can hinder proper moral decision-making. I can imagine a version of this course that is less interdisciplinary and more philosophically rigorous, but I think that an approach that links philosophy to other disciplines is a more fruitful approach in this context, especially since almost all students who take this course have no prior exposure to philosophy.
The assessments in the course are varied—a combination of in-class exams, oral presentations, online quizzes, in-class writing, and a final project. Some of these assessment methods may seem “old school” since they involve writing things by hand, but they have numerous pedagogical advantages. In-class exams remain one of the best ways to assess students’ abilities to recall information, and students also remember things better when they write them down by hand rather than typing the same information. These assessments are also more AI-resistant than take-home assignments.
While I periodically change and update readings in all my courses, the biggest recent changes I have made to Ethical Leadership are related to the final project. It used to be a traditional term paper where students would pick a contemporary or historical leader, appraise the extent to which that person acted ethically in their leadership role, and present their main findings to the class. While the main objective of the assignment remains the same, I am changing the written component of the assignment to be more dynamic: students will instead create an online artifact using Adobe Express with written and visual elements. (The University of Arizona is an Adobe Creative Campus, which means that all students and faculty have free access to a wide array of Adobe tools and products.) My hope is that this change will further dissuade students from relying on AI to generate content and that it will foster greater creativity in how the students compose and present their Leadership Analyses. This project also used to be a solo endeavor, and I have opted to make it a collaborative assignment. In a recent meeting with faculty who teach other courses in the CLC, we all agreed that the ability to collaborate effectively was essential to good leadership, so integrating collaboration into this project seemed appropriate.
For instructors who want to adapt some of this course material into their own courses, I will offer three bits of advice. First, the readings by Joanne Ciulla have been very well-received by my students, and because they have many examples and case studies, they provide a lot of material to fuel class discussion or designed activities. Second, a short unit on leadership can be a nice supplement to content on virtue ethics, and there’s a significant literature on what virtuous leadership is. Third, the unit on the psychology of moral decision-making can be a nice addition to an applied ethics survey course, even if that course has nothing to do with leadership.
Trevor Hedberg
Trevor Hedberg is Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona with a joint appointment between the W.A. Franke Honors College and the Philosophy Department. His research focuses on issues in environmental ethics, medical ethics, procreative ethics, and the intersection of these subfields. (Book: https://www.routledge.com/The-Environmental-Impact-of-Overpopulation-The-Ethics-of-Procreation/Hedberg/p/book/9781032236766)
