Abstract
Ethics bowl is an academic competition combining a valuable and distinctive educational experience with the excitement and fun of a competitive game. Section “Format, Procedures, and Rules of the APPE-IEB” describes the format, procedures, and rules of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (APPE-IEB). Section “Brief History of the APPE-IEB (Association for Practical and Professional Ethics Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl)” summarizes the APPE-IEB’s origin and development. Section “Basic Educational Objectives and of the APPE-IEB” identifies and analyzes the APPE-IEB’s basic educational objectives, making apparent the close coincidence of these objectives with those of ethics across the curriculum. Finally, Sect. “Is the APPE-IEB Too Competitive?” discusses the apparent tension between the APPE-IEB’s basic educational objectives and its utilization of the desire for competitive success as a motivator.
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Notes
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The official Rules for the APPE-IEB National Championship Competition can be found at: http://appe.indiana.edu/ethics-bowl/cases-rules-and-guidelines/.
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My CSEP colleagues during the period 1993–1995, which were the years before I took the lead in organizing and conducting the first APPE-IEB were: Michael Davis, Ellen Fox, William Pardue, and Vivian Weil.
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From 1997 through 2003 the APPE-IEB was supported by generous grants from Sears Roebuck & Co.’s Office of Business Practices. During the period 2000–2006 the APPE-IEB was supported as well by a generous matching grant from Robert Galvin and Robert Pritzker in connection with the Illinois Tech capital campaign. In 2003, the APPE-IEB was supported also by a grant from the AMS Corporation, and in 2004 it was supported in part by the Raj Soin College of Business of Wright State University.
Also, I would be gravely remiss not to acknowledge the unstinting, enthusiastic support and assistance of Brian Schrag, who was Executive Director of APPE from its founding in 1990 to 2011, and of Stuart Yoak, Brian’s successor as APPE Executive Director.
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The members of the coordinating committee (which was an informal, ad hoc group of people from whom I requested help), were: Anthony Brinkman, Patrick, Croskery (who, at the time was the (again ad hoc) co-director of the APPE-IEB), Joanne Ladenson, and Sarah Pfatteicher.
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The six independent regional ethics bowls were the following: Indiana (later, Central States), Texas, Wasatch (Utah), Northeast, California, and Pacific Northwest.
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The Southeast and the Upper Midwest regional bowls.
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The Rocky Mountain and the Mid-Atlantic regional bowls.
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A Google Search on ‘Ethics Bowl’ will generate hundreds of items, indicating the amount and diversity of different of ethics bowl competitions at this time, which include, among others, competitions for medical students, graduate students in archaeology, undergraduate college students, high school students, and, most recently, middle school students.
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The News and Observer, Durham County (NC), April 11, 2017.
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In this regard, Ronald Dworkin considers the conception of a “community of principle” intrinsic to constitutional democratic government. Under this conception, according to Dworkin,
members of a genuine political community … accept that they are governed by common principles, not just by rules hammered out in a [mere] political compromise. Politics … for such people [in large part] is a theater of debate about which principles the community should adopt as a system, which view it should take of justice, fairness, and due process. Members of a community of principle accept that their political rights and duties are not exhausted by particular decsions their political institutions have reached, but accept, more generally the scheme of principles those decisions presuppose and endorse. So such a member accepts that others have rights and that he has duties following from that scheme, even though they have never beenformally identified or declared.) (Law’s Empire (Cambridge, MA, 1986), 210).
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The idea of virtues as internal to practices is presented and developed in a form highly influential among academic philosophers by Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN, 1984).
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See Ladenson (2011).
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Expressive of such concern, in 2015 the APPE-IEB Executive Board created an award for the team at the National Championship Competition that exemplifies best the spirit of the APPE-IEB. (The award winner is selected by how many votes a team receives from the teams against which it competed in its three preliminary matches, as well as from the moderators and judges who interacted with the team.) I was honored deeply that the Executive Board named the award in my honor.
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It seems to me, however, that, in this regard, a research study should be noted that was conducted by Diana E. Hess and Paula McAvoy, described in detail in Hess’ and McAvoy’s book, The Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic Education (New York, 2015).
The Hess McAvoy study involved over 1000 high school students and 35 high school teachers in three states—Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. It took place over four years (2005-2009), and had both quantitative and qualitative components. The quantitative component was a statistical analysis of student responses to questionnaires given them both prior to and after taking courses in which controversial public issues were a significant part of the course subject matter. The qualitative component consisted of classroom observation and extensive interviews of both students and teachers.
A principal purpose of the study was to learn about students’ perceptions of what they learned from their social studies classes that covered controversial public issues. In this regard Hess and McAvoy were interested especially in finding out about the extent to which students expressed the judgments that they became more interested, as a result of taking the classes, in understanding the viewpoints of people whose opinions on the issues differ from theirs’, and in discussing the issues with them.
Hess and McAvoy distinguished three kinds of courses described below.
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Best Practice Discussion: Students in these classes engaged in discussion of controversial public issues more than 20% of the time. These discussions also involved students preparing in advance, significant student-to-student talk, and high levels of student participation.
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Discussion: Students in these classes engaged in discussion 20% or more of the time, but fell short of Best Practice Discussion because most of the talk was student-to-teacher and not student-to-student. Students often were not expected to prepare for discussion and usually only a small number of students took part in the discussion.
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Lecture: These classes did not meet the threshold of using some form of discussion at least 20% of the time. The dominant pedagogical strategy was teacher lecture.
Hess and McAvoy report that “the qualitative and quantitative data [produced by their research study] showed that students in Best Practice Discussion classrooms were more likely to report that they are more interested in politics as a result of taking the course, more likely to enjoy political talk, and more comfortable with disagreement.” From the standpoint of the quantitative data the study generated, which was analyzed statistically via multiple linear regression modeling, when compared to all other predictors in the model, the Best Practice Discussion classroom was by far the strongest predictor” of the above mentioned reports.
It was encouraging for me to learn about the results of the study summarized above. In this regard, I believe it is apparent that the APPE-IEB is a prime example of Best Practice Discussion, as Hess and McAvoy define it.
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Reference
Ladenson, R. (2011). Civility as a democratic civic virtue. In D. S. Mower & W. L. Robison (Eds.) Civility in politics and education (pp. 201–220). New York.
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Ladenson, R.F. (2018). Ethics Bowl: An Approach to Implementing Ethics Across the Curriculum. In: Englehardt, E.E., Pritchard, M.S. (eds) Ethics Across the Curriculum—Pedagogical Perspectives. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78939-2_18
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