SS 15 - We’re Running out of Time… Teaching Ethics Should Not Be Optional

Session Description: Students are not only interested but motivated by the ethical dimension of environmental science and ecology. Instructors should use that motivation in their courses rather than send a message that ethics is excluded from the course because it isn’t science. The session builds capacity in instructors in their ability to address the ethical issues in complex ecological problems with lecture content followed by small and large group discussions.  Participants will learn how to introduce environmental ethics as a driver of content and skills in their science teaching. 
Participants will engage with a brief exercise to reflect on their current pedagogy and educational beliefs. Participants will then explore the four environmental ethical principles of Precautionary Principle, Biodiversity, Environmental Justice, and Sustainability through interactive slides and handouts. Specifically, the session will compare the four environmental ethical principles to biomedical and public health ethical principles used in medical schools and schools of public health.

In small groups, participants will explain how the four environmental ethical principles apply independently or present conflicts and necessitate trade-offs in various examples.
Participants extend their experience with the four environmental ethical principles in small groups where they brainstorm and plan mini lessons with assessments that relate to global and local examples. The short term outcome is for instructors to become comfortable introducing the environmental ethical principles into their teaching. The long term outcome is for students to make better reasoned and more ethical decisions about managing our natural resources and protecting human health using the four environmental ethical principles.
Finally, participants share their small group products with the whole group. Participants will leave the session with a number of resources, including handouts to guide their next steps back in their classrooms, best practices to deliver the content and skills, and opportunities to network with other instructors to share ideas.
The session supports ESA’s 4DEE Framework. The 4 Dimension Ecology Education Framework’s Dimension 3 Human-Environment Interactions identifies critical thinking about values underlying environmental problems, challenges, and opportunities. While 4DEE focuses on undergraduate ecology, the presenters will share how environmental ethical principles can align with the critical thinking element in Dimension 3 Human-Environment Interactions and have been applied to AP environmental science and graduate programs in public health.