Location
Engel 223
Event Website
http://www.cpe.vt.edu/cuenr/index.html
Start Date
3-27-2010 11:30 AM
End Date
3-27-2010 12:00 PM
Description
Wildlife researchers and managers frequently have to contend with difficult ethical questions during the course of their work, but currently lack an explicit scholarly forum to help them analyze the complicated ethical situations they encounter in the field, the laboratory, or conservation area. Since neither environmental ethics, nor animal ethics, nor research ethics currently addresses the tradeoff problems peculiar to wildlife research and management, a new field is needed. It must be the interdisciplinary product of organized and on‐going discussions across the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, and the conservation professions. Minteer and Collins (2005) proposed the creation of an extensive case database, a tool that can help students, scientists, and managers learn from the problems and solutions of others and improve their critical thinking and moral reasoning abilities within a research or management setting. We are contributing to this database. We are also working on the next logical step, the development of a framework for this new “ecological ethics”. Additionally, we are experimenting with novel pedagogical methods for delivering this framework to graduate students, and giving them practice applying ecological ethics to particular cases. We also provide opportunities for students shadow members of our Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee in order to discuss actual cases with the committee members. In the current paper we illustrate the need for ecological ethics, demonstrate example cases, describe our pedagogical methods, and present initial assessments of the effectiveness of our methods.
Included in
Teaching Ecological Ethics
Engel 223
Wildlife researchers and managers frequently have to contend with difficult ethical questions during the course of their work, but currently lack an explicit scholarly forum to help them analyze the complicated ethical situations they encounter in the field, the laboratory, or conservation area. Since neither environmental ethics, nor animal ethics, nor research ethics currently addresses the tradeoff problems peculiar to wildlife research and management, a new field is needed. It must be the interdisciplinary product of organized and on‐going discussions across the natural sciences, social sciences, the humanities, and the conservation professions. Minteer and Collins (2005) proposed the creation of an extensive case database, a tool that can help students, scientists, and managers learn from the problems and solutions of others and improve their critical thinking and moral reasoning abilities within a research or management setting. We are contributing to this database. We are also working on the next logical step, the development of a framework for this new “ecological ethics”. Additionally, we are experimenting with novel pedagogical methods for delivering this framework to graduate students, and giving them practice applying ecological ethics to particular cases. We also provide opportunities for students shadow members of our Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee in order to discuss actual cases with the committee members. In the current paper we illustrate the need for ecological ethics, demonstrate example cases, describe our pedagogical methods, and present initial assessments of the effectiveness of our methods.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cuenr/Sessions/Courses/4
Comments
Citation: Wallace, M.C., D. Perry, G. Perry, H. Curzer, P. Muhlberger. 2010. Teaching ecological ethics. UENR Biennial Conference, Session Innovations in Pedagogy, Course Design, Paper Number 4. http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cuenr/Sessions/Courses/4/