Institute News
Bioethics in the High School Classroom
May 16, 2011
Study in bioethics is often reserved for students at the college level. But Dr. Laura Bishop, Academic Program Officer at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and the Bioethics Research Library, is working to change that way of thinking.
Last year, Dr. Bishop designed and led a workshop on the ethics of food at the annual Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (JSHS). The Symposium brings together high school students and their teachers for a weekend of enrichment activities and seminars in the fields of science, technology and engineering. Dr. Bishop's class featured an interactive game designed to teach students about genetic interventions in food products. The course was a resounding success: as one science teacher and attendee of her class reported to her later, “the bioethics course was the highlight of my two days here—and that's saying a lot, because in another class, I got to see a cadaver!”
Her independent work with the JSHS is one of several projects Dr. Bishop pursues out of a longstanding passion for working with high school instructors and students. “It's a very interesting age,” she says, “in which students are still turning into the people they're going to be. They ask questions boldly, not self-consciously. They're still open to new experiences.” And these are precisely the qualities that make excellent bioethicists.
It was with this in mind that Dr. Bishop and a team of KIE scholars began in 1998 to develop the High School Bioethics Curriculum Project. The HSBCP is an approach to curricular planning specially designed for high school students. Dr. Bishop, along with Ruth Guyer, Ph.D., Kennedy Institute scholar LeRoy Walters, Ph.D., and lead teachers Lola Szobota, M.A, M.Ed. (science) and Linda Anderson, M.A. (history and ethics) designed and hosted a series of workshops for high school teachers from around the region and across the country using funds from The Greenwall Foudation and an anonymous donor to Georgetown University. The goal of this program was to introduce teachers to the field of bioethics, provide them with written teaching materials, and encourage them to incorporate specific bioethics issues into their classroom discussions.
Bioethics is a field that does not fall neatly into any single discipline or high school class subject, so Bishop and her partners took a multi-disciplinary approach. The HSBCP works with teachers across the conventional high school curriculum, including instructors of biology, social studies, literature, government, religion, economics, and history. Instructors in each school are encouraged to coordinate parallel reading and writing assignments around bioethics issues. Teachers from Our Lady of Good Council High School, for example, now offer a special summer course for St. Mary's scholars on the theme of “Frankenstein” during which science, literature and government instructors chaperone a field trip to the Bioethics Library as well as coordinate their readings and assignments around the bioethics issue of organ transplantation.
The HSBCP helps high school instructors, like those at St. Mary's, build their curricula around real case studies. Students find a source of motivation, Bishop says, knowing that the problems they discuss are faced by real people, who have to make decisions that affect the lives of others. “Student interest is maximized,” she says, “when they see how what they learn applies to real world problems.”
Such cases provide a context in which students can discuss not just the facts surrounding medical technologies and policies, but the values that underlie bioethics decisions as well. The controversial nature of the topics gives students a chance to learn to articulate their views and to argue persuasively, in a way that most high school classes don't. “Bioethics gives certain students a real opportunity to shine,” says Bishop, “especially those who discover they're good at debating, speaking publicly—things you don't usually do in a science class.”
Today the Kennedy Institute, through the Bioethics Research Library, still maintains a supporting relationship with local and regional high schools in their efforts to bring bioethics into the classroom. It offers myriad resources, like the growing A/V Lending Library, and hosts several visits from high school classes every semester—during which students use the library's prodigious resources to research paper projects.
Thousands of high school students across the country have benefited from the workshops the Institute prepared and led for their teachers. Some of these educators, like Linda Harvison, and Lori Harper at St. Joseph's Academy in Baton Rouge, have been inspired to lead workshops of their own. And for each of them, the excitement of teaching bioethics continues to resound. An attendee of the Institute's workshop, who incorporates bioethics into his psychology class, was asked by the mother of a student: “what did you do to my teenager? He actually talked to me about what he did at school at the dinner table last night!” Our attendee noted: “That brought a smile to my face.”