A PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR INTRODUCING ETHICS TO GEOSCIENCE STUDENTS IN THEIR UNDERGRADUATE YEARS

Many faculty shy away from including some aspects of geoethics in their courses because they don’t feel qualified to teach ethics. However, our students need to be able to think ethically in their future careers and with their deep understanding of the discipline, geoscience faculty are well-positioned, if given the means to do so, to introduce geoethics within their courses. We offer some insights and ideas through which ethical decision-making can be incorporated into geoscience courses, affording students the opportunity to develop a geoethical perspective, and providing faculty with the tools to address and to effectively evaluate students in aspects of geoethics relevant to their individual courses. We propose a framework for teaching and evaluating geoethics in undergraduate courses in which: (1) we recognize that ethical considerations can be approached in a similar manner to a scientific research problem because decisions around an ethical issue follow a similar process as answering a scientific question; (2) we identify examples of ethical issues that can be directly linked to several geoscience topics typically taught at the early undergraduate level; and (3) we propose evidence – including the development of critical thinking – we may use to evaluate students’ growing understanding of geoethical issues, in addition to affording us with the tools to measure the effectiveness of such an approach. Finally, and since we are but starting on this framework, we call on the geoscience teaching community to help us collect data to quantify the success of this new framework.