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Rock Ethics Institute Faculty Seminar Fellowships

Rock Ethics Institute and the Schreyer Honors College
2009 Ethics Seminars for Faculty

The Rock Ethics Institute has developed Ethics Seminars for faculty in response to the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ recent call for education that fosters “intellectual honesty, responsibility for society’s moral health and social justice, active participation as a citizen of a diverse democracy, discernment of the ethical consequences of decisions and actions, and deep understanding of one’s self and respect for the complex identities of others, their histories, and their cultures.”[1] Rock Ethics Institute Ethics Seminars provide faculty from across the disciplines with the resources needed to integrate ethics-related topics into their courses.

The mission of the Schreyer Honors College is congruent with that of the Rock Ethics Institute: to advance academic excellence with integrity and to encourage students to be engaged in civic leadership. To further this mission, the Schreyer Honors College is partnering with the Rock Ethics Institute and the College of the Liberal Arts to offer faculty the opportunity to enhance their current or upcoming honors classes by incorporating into them elements related to ethics and ethical leadership.

Thus this call: tenure-track faculty and full-time multi-year fixed term faculty in any college are encouraged to apply to participate in the 2009 Ethics Seminar.

[1] Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, http://www.greaterexpectations.org/

The Concept

While encouraging the development of courses wholly devoted to ethical theory and practices, the mission of the Schreyer Honors College will best be achieved when a significant ethical dimension is added to a broader range of courses, including ones in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts that are taught by faculty who have developed a solid understanding of ethics and a commitment to teaching ethics-related principles, issues, and concepts.

The Ethics Seminar will provide Honors Faculty with the resources they need to develop and integrate a significant ethics dimension into their courses. The workshop will offer resources and strategies for integrating ethics into a course or courses taught by the faculty member and encourage faculty to include concepts, case studies, and other course materials in three areas: academic integrity, professional ethics, and social responsibility. The seminar will emphasize analyses of pressing social and global problems and will offer resources for developing ethical leadership skills.

The Ethics Seminar will be co-directed by Nancy Tuana, DuPont/Class of 1949 Professor of Ethics and Director, Rock Ethics Institute; and Jonathan Marks, Associate Professor of Bioethics, Humanities, and Law.

The Seminar

The Seminar will consist of two elements:

A workshop, held during the week of May 26–29, 2009, with an additional day scheduled in August designed to provide a review of curricular materials that faculty develop over the summer. The workshop will emphasize these elements:
- An overview of the concept of an ethically engaged university and a discussion of the role of the instructor in cultivating ethical literacy skills;
- An overview of key ethical frameworks and concepts, drawn from scholarship on ethics;
- Pedagogical techniques for integrating ethical frameworks and moral reasoning into curricula;
- Resources for teaching ethical leadership skills;
- Ethics case studies;
- Resources for assessment and for matching learning objectives with classroom and out-of-class activities; and
- The opportunity to preview, with peers, the curricular materials developed over the course of the summer of 2009.
Faculty are required to meet over the course of the academic year 2009–10, three times per semester (six times in all). These meetings will encourage faculty to:
- refine their curricular materials;
- reflect on additional pedagogical resources;
- compare best practices and learn from one another;
- address specific issues as they develop in their classes and brainstorm problems encountered in the courses; and assess the curricular strategies

Faculty Responsibilities and Compensation

In exchange for each faculty fellow's participation, the fellow's department will receive $4000 to enable the fellow to purchase a course release. That course release is intended to give faculty fellows time to redesign and develop their ethics-enhanced Honors course.

Faculty who are selected to be fellows will, in turn, agree to do the following:

attend the workshop May and August 2009 (five days total);
commit time in the summer of 2009 to develop the new elements of their course related to ethics and to implement this redesigned curriculum during the 2009–10 academic year;
attend the best practices follow-up seminars over the academic year 2009–10 (six meetings);
commit to including the ethics enhancements in their current and future honors courses.

How to Apply

Applicants must complete application form, which includes the following components:

a syllabus and/or course description for the course on which each faculty member will work;
a brief description of how ethics might be incorporated into the course;
a short summary of ethics-related topics or activities that each faculty member would like to explore during the workshop;
a short curriculum vitae; and
department head signature.

Deadline for applications is *February 20, 2009. All materials must be delivered to the Rock Ethics Institute, 201 Willard Building.

*Due to extenuating circumstances, the application deadline has been extended to noon on March 6, 2009.