Integrating Ethics Across the Curriculum

Purpose

For over a decade, ethics has been taught most commonly in business and medical schools and in the philosophy departments of colleges and universities. Today, with widespread abuses in many sectors of our society, there is growing interest in bringing ethics into other disciplines, as well as into different types of institutions and to different student populations. The purpose of this interdisciplinary project was to carry out just such curricular integration in a community college.

Innovative Features

Eighty-four Aurora faculty members in five groups attended seminars to learn how to integrate ethics across the entire college curriculum. These faculty represented 20 departments, and taught almost 2,000 students. In the first stage of the project, f aculty studied the nature of ethics and its application to their disciplines, using a handbook prepared by the project director. In the later stages, they incorporated ethics into their courses.

This ambitious undertaking is especially remarkable in the context of a community college with a non-traditional student body. It grew out of a million dollar grant awarded in 1987 by the Colorado Commission on Higher Education to support the infusion of critical thinking into the College's coursework.

The ethics project had, from its beginning in 1989, the advantage of working with faculty and administrators already favorably disposed to instructional reform. Not only were the faculty committed to making their courses more relevant to the lives of their students, but their participation in faculty development activities was partly linked to salary increases.

The project was influenced by an earlier FIPSE grant to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota to increase the ethical sensitivity and social responsibility of students in professional programs. (See Lessons Learned II, available from FIPSE.)

Evaluation

Project staff evaluated the impact of the effort through the Defining Issues Test (DIT), faculty reports, and a survey of students. The DIT, developed by James Rest, measures the progress of moral growth from egoism to the adoption of moral principles.

Project Impact

Scores from pre- and post-DIT tests administered to students of faculty in all five groups showed an overall favorable shift, suggesting that the new ethics elements in the curriculum increased the capacity of students for principled, moral thinking. In the year-end reports of how they and their students were progressing with the integration of ethics into their courses, faculty stated that the integration improved students' ability to understand and apply ethics practically and theoretically.

Students' survey responses emphasized that integrated ethics courses had enriched and advanced their understanding of ethical issues in social and disciplinary contexts. Ninety-eight percent of students in three of the faculty groups believed that they had a better understanding of how to resolve ethical dilemmas. In all the groups there was some evidence that, by discussing discipline-specific ethical issues, students found new relevance in the academic material and even made connections to ethical issues in their other courses.

Lessons Learned

Despite the college s strong and continuing support for the project over the years, the director came to believe that ethics across the curriculum may be too diffuse to increase the social responsibility of students. He learned about research by Judith Boss at the University of Rhode Island in which she used the DIT in evaluating students in an ethics class with service learning compared to those in an ethics class without it. She found greater gains on the DIT in the class with service learning.

This result prompted the project director at Aurora to make the same experiment, with similar findings: community service seemed to draw students out of their relativism and egoism and give them a better grasp of the ethical dimensions of issues. He concluded that linking ethics and service learning and focusing on civic responsibility is the way to develop a sense of commitment to the public good. He addressed this problem by connecting the Ethics Across the Curriculum project to the Kellogg-funded Beacon Project, which emphasizes the ethical content of civic responsibility. In addition to their usual course work, students now explore civic responsibility issues by doing field work in the community.

Project Continuation and Recognition

Despite an added focus on civic responsibility through the Beacon Project, curricular integration of ethics remains a permanent part of the college's curriculum and teaching repertoire. Polls of past faculty participants show that all but two respondents are still implementing ethics in their courses, some noting that they have varied the way in which they teach it.

In 1992, the college sponsored a retreat on the project for representatives from 20 colleges and universities. The American Association of Community Colleges granted Aurora a Kellogg/Beacon award to assist six other community colleges in building inter disciplinary faculty development around the subject of civic responsibility. This involved faculty from FIPSE's ethics project in seminars and curricular work to integrate civic responsibility themes into courses and to assist the other colleges. This effort culminated in 1993 as all participants came together at the College's yearly International Faculty Development Conference. Finally, this Beacon Project contributed to the American Association of Community Colleges receiving a major Learn and Serve grant to promote service learning among ten community colleges in 1994.

Available Information

Faculty on the ethics integration project have given countless presentations at major disciplinary meetings, retreats and workshops, at professional associations and for community organizations. They have published a variety of articles on the moral dimensions of teaching. The director wrote a Participant's Handbook for Integrating Ethics into the Curriculum as the primary text to guide faculty in curriculum development and, in 1996, published a book, The Curricular Integration of Ethics, with Praeger Publishing Company. He also is co-editor of Promoting Community Renewal Through Civic Literacy and Service Learning, to appear in the 1996 Jossey Bass New Directions Series, and of Service Learning and Philosophy, to be published by the American Association of Higher Education in 1997.

Information regarding these materials may be obtained from:

[Improving the Undergraduate Curriculum] [Table of Contents] [University of Minnesota]

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