ETHICS - Ethics Teaching Highlighted In Contextualised Scenarios

Introduction

The Ethics Teaching Highlighted In Contextualised Scenarios (ETHICS) project is based at the Philosophical and Religious Studies subject centre of the Academy (PRS) at the University of Leeds in partnership with 5 other subject centres:

1. Bioscience
2. Health Sciences and Practice
3. UK Centre for Legal Education
4. Our subject centre contact is Megan Quentin-Baxter
5. Psychology

The project website is at:http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/ethics/index.html.

Case Studies from the subject centre

• Case Study 5 A patient who is refusing treatment when there is a serious risk of death
  Rev Bryan Vernon (University of Newcastle)Rev Bryan Vernon
• Case Study 6 The morality of using healthy cats as donors for renal transplant surgery
  Ms Carol Gray (University of Liverpool) Ms Carol Gray
• Case Study 7 A couple who experience a range of medical problems, involving the need to make difficult decisions about genetics
  Dr Jan Deckers (University of Newcastle) Dr Jan Deckers

Applied ETHICS workshop: 'Shared learning in higher education and beyond'

The ETHICS project offered a workshop at two alternative venues:

• Birkbeck College, London, Wednesday 12 November, 2003 10.45am to 15.00pm
• King's Manor, University of York, Wednesday 26 November, 2003 10.45am to 15.00pm

These workshops offered an opportunity to examine ethics teaching based on shared learning in both Higher Education and Continuing Professional Development. It had the following objectives:

• To elucidate the current relationship between these two parallel teaching and learning environments in applied ethics.
• To map out areas/issues for future development

For further information please see:

http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/ethics/index.html

Or contact the project co-ordinator Megan Quentin-Baxter

Background

The project is a reponse to the growing requirement for ethics to be both a professional and academic component of qualifications throughout the higher education sector.

Increasingly, departments must make provision for the teaching of ethics in relation to their particular subject areas. Pressure to meet these requirements comes from a number of sources:

• Most benchmarking statements make specific demands for the teaching of ethics
• Professional associations place an obligation on the inclusion of ethics in curricula
• The embedding of ethics into higher education curricula is being seen as an excellent way of providing students with key transferable skills to meet government employability needs

Purpose of the project

The collective examination of the current provision of professional and academic ethics teaching across a number of cognate subject disciplines. This will identify key concerns and problems and help identify evidence of further good practice for investigation and analysis.

Aims and activities

This will principally be achieved through:

• Discovery, dissemination and embedding of effective practice in the learning and teaching of ethics primarily through the collection of contextualised teaching scenarios (known as case studies in some disciplines) used in a cross section of cognate subject communities
• Development of cross and sub-disciplinary people networks to facilitate the brokerage of good practice in the learning and teaching of ethics
• Brokerage and dissemination of existing pedagogical research on the learning and teaching of ethics and the development of new research through the commissioning of mini-projects

Ethics miniproject news

Congratulations to Prof. Deborah Murdoch-Eaton and Dr Jonathan Parsons, School of Medicine, University of Leeds, on the funding of their miniproject: 'Practical Teaching packages on ethics and law in Medicine and related sciences' which has concluded with a fascinating final report. The principals of ethics and law are core components within many science based curricula. The aims of this project are to expand existing ethics and law teaching by developing two teaching and learning packages.

One will include generic and specialty-specific components of value to both medical schools and other university departments involved in health related sciences. This will be designed to be adaptable and able to be integrated within existing courses. The second will be a subject specific package for final year medical students to address key ethical and professional issues before they enter into professional practice.

For the latest news and information go to the project website at: http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/ethics/index.html