INSTRUCTORS

Course Curriculum

Challenge your students through structured dialogue and guided reflection.

How was this curriculum developed?

The Values and Responsibility in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science curriculum has been developed by a team of philosophers, social scientists, and environmental scientists who recognize that socio-environmental problems are often crucially dependent on values and policy considerations. We have relied on our experience and expertise, supplemented by a national survey of environmental science instructors (Hall et al. 2017), to craft a curriculum that addresses the values and policy dimensions of interdisciplinary environmental science problems. Drawing on educational best practices and the Toolbox dialogue approach (http://tdi.msu.edu/), this curriculum enables students to evaluate and discuss the values and policy landscape of their particular interdisciplinary environmental science program.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Our curriculum provides two teaching modules designed to be incorporated into existing interdisciplinary environmental science graduate courses. The lessons, alongside the scientific curricula instructors are already teaching, are intended to prepare interdisciplinary environmental science graduate students for some of the ethical challenges they will face in their careers by emphasizing the importance of the accountability of researchers in professional sciences to both decision-makers and non-research communities. Based on contemporary educational theory, our curriculum is committed to the idea that students best learn conceptually challenging ethical content through structured peer dialogue and guided self-reflection. Our approach derives its dialogue-based workshop model for interdisciplinary environmental education from the NSF-supported Toolbox framework, which works to enhance communication in interdisciplinary research.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

  • By the end of the module, students will be able to:
  • Describe the ethical challenges of risk, expertise, non-human impacts, and policy constraints in relation to their interdisciplinary environmental science field.
  • Recognize risk, expertise, non-human impacts, and policy constraints in case studies related to their interdisciplinary environmental science area.
  • Assess how risk, expertise, non-human impacts, and policy constraints should affect their own conduct as practitioners in the interdisciplinary environmental sciences.
  • Identify and analyze differences and similarities among the perspectives of multiple environmental science disciplines on risk, expertise, non-human impacts, and policy constraints.
  • Formulate dialogue prompts that apply the broad concepts related to values and responsibility in interdisciplinary environmental science, including risk, expertise, non-human impacts, and policy constraints, to each student’s particular research and practice specialty.
  • Articulate and discuss their perspectives on risk, expertise, non-human impacts, and policy constraints in interdisciplinary environmental science with other members of the course.
  • Produce a project that applies knowledge of the values and responsibility dimensions of interdisciplinary environmental science to a problem in one’s own research or practice domain.

Did you use our curriculum?

We’re always looking for feedback to improve our curriculum.
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Values and Responsibility in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science

This project is part of the Ethics Education in Science & Engineering program at NSF.

SBE-1338626 — University of Idaho

Contact

eese@msu.edu
517-432-0752

© EESE. All Right Reserved 2017.

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