Giving Students the Building Blocks for Ethics in Biology
For Biology professor Dr. Marty Maas, ethics is a critical part of teaching students to think like scientists. Using ethical reasoning skills in the classroom prepares students to understand the ethical issues that will inevitably arise in their academic and professional careers. Because discussing ethical issues was already part of her approach to teaching her Introductory Laboratory Experiments in Biology course, adding an Ethics Flag made sense as a natural extension of how she was teaching the course. The purpose of the Ethics Flag at UT Austin — “to equip students with skills that are necessary for making ethical decisions in their adult and professional lives” — complemented Professor Maas’ vision for teaching students to use ethics when thinking like scientists.
Although Professor Maas previously incorporated ethical issues in her lectures, adding the Ethics Flag challenged her to be more intentional about teaching the students how to engage with biology issues from an ethical perspective. In a course with almost 650 students each semester, that could seem like a daunting task. However, over two semesters, Professor Maas worked with the Center for the Skills and Experience Flags to develop and refine assignments that help students apply ethical reasoning to real-world situations.
Each ethics assignment is designed to complement the course’s biology content so students get a holistic understanding of ethical decision-making in relation to the discipline. Professor Maas develops the students’ practical ethical skills over the course of the entire semester, teaching them first how to identify ethical issues in biology and then how to think critically about those issues using a framework for ethical reasoning. By the end of the semester, she challenges them to apply biology techniques and ethical reasoning to argue for a specific way to address a current ethical issue in biology.
The first practical skill Professor Maas wants her students to hone is identifying ethical issues and understanding what distinguishes an ethical issue from one that is primarily legal or biological. She teaches students to identify issues that are ethical in nature by working backwards from how the issue would potentially be addressed. Is the issue best resolved by using a better biology technique or more research? Or, can the issue be resolved by changing or reinterpreting a law? The issues that cannot be easily resolved by either method and require further moral considerations are the ethical issues that she wants students to grapple with.
Professor Maas models this process for them in lectures, and she uses a framework adapted from Dani Elliott’s handbook, Ethical Challenges, to show the students how to systematically analyze cases. Students work in groups on cases that relate to the course’s biology content, such as informed consent in research studies and the case of Henrietta Lacks, a poor, African American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge and became the basis for groundbreaking medical research. The students then work together to identify other potential ethical issues in biology, and they apply ethical reasoning to real situations they encounter in the lab. As a result, students emerge from the class with tools they can independently apply to a variety of issues in biology, and with practice using these tools.
The first time Professor Maas taught the course with the Ethics Flag, she gave the students an ethics exam. In feedback surveys, however, many students said that the exam made the ethics work feel disconnected from the course content. So this semester, instead of the exam, the students work on a group project to identify an ethical issue in biology, analyze different stakeholders, and propose solutions. The project builds on the skills the students learn throughout the course and challenges them to think of solutions. Professor Maas wanted the students not only to identify different stakeholders’ perspectives, but to argue for their own positions. At the beginning of the semester, many of the students are uncomfortable taking a stance on an ethical issue and get offended when someone who disagrees. As they gain practice applying an ethical reasoning framework to cases in their discussion groups, students develop their skills in taking a position and defending it using scientific evidence and ethical reasoning.
Since adding the Ethics Flag, Professor Maas has noticed a marked difference in the atmosphere of the course. The students have more animated discussions with each other and develop relationships with their peers. Building those relationships over the course of the semester helps students become more confident in taking and defending a stance on ethical issues.
By integrating ethics throughout her biology course, Professor Maas prepares students to understand and engage with current ethical issues in Biology. Before the course, most students have already been exposed to controversial issues in Biology such as organ donations and stem cell research in daily conversations. But Professor Maas gives students the scientific and ethical skills to engage in these discussions in a nuanced way. Giving students the ability to identify an ethical issue, understand the different stakeholders, and apply ethical reasoning to it gives them the confidence and skills to offer potential answers to the complex ethical dilemmas we grapple with in our society.
By Abby Attia, Graduate Assistant at the Center for Skills and Experience Flags
