Bioethical Challenges: A Global Perspective

This course is designed for the educated citizen and does not carry any special disciplinary expectations. The readings are selected to be accessible and understandable by undergraduate university students from any major or area of specialization.

Students will be expected to assemble arguments, pro and con, based initially on the readings provided, plus any additional materials they choose to assemble, and then those arguments will be subjected to careful and thorough critiques. Teams, with members, from all three universities will be given focused assignments within the general topic areas for which they will have primary responsibility to lead the discussions and to prepare summary ‘briefing’ papers. These ‘briefing’ papers may take the form of ‘Letters to the Editor’ as might be done with newspapers, or of the form provided as ‘background’ for a decision maker such as a non-specialist politician or other government official. In general they will be one page in length and at least one group will have the responsibility for preparing one of those and distributing to the rest of the class. These, too, will be subject to careful scrutiny and critique (with compassion, civility and rigor).

Each student will then be expected to prepare an individual paper which contains summary, analysis and conclusions about each of the three topics at the end of the semester. These papers will probably be in the range of 10-15 pages in length and will be supported with a modest number of supporting references. The main idea here is for each individual to project their own perspective on the topics at hand.

Classes will be structured to emphasize student-to-student discussion, argument, persuasion, and enlightenment. The faculty coordinator will try to facilitate, serve as a moderator and, sometimes, a source of information but the main responsibility for carrying the discussions will lie with the class participants.

Students will usually need to communicate with team members from the other universities outside of class time individually and there will be quite a bit of email communication to/from the class as a whole.

Accomplishment of all of these assignments will qualify each student for a one credit hour, upper division, independent study in the course EBIO4460. If students wish to add additional credit hours, they will need to negotiate additional time and assignments with MCG. Preference will be given to students for class spaces for those choosing the 1 credit hour option.

Class time will be in the Stadium video classroom and will occur on a strange, irregular schedule to partly distribute the odd hours across the three universities. Since student to student interaction will be a main part of the course, attendance will be taken and expected.