title: Making Choices: Ethical Decisions in a Global Context.
abstract: The changing milieu of research--increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative--prompts greater emphasis on cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups. Ethics training, however, tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of making ethical choices. This paper confronts those challenges by presenting a new curricular model developed by an international team. It examines ethics across a very broad range of situations, using case studies and employing the perspectives of social science, humanities and the sciences. The course has been developed and taught in a highly collaborative way, involving researchers and students at Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Brown University. The article presents the curricular modules of the course, learning outcomes, an assessment framework developed for the project, and a discussion of evaluation findings.
authors.affiliation: Department of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University, Box 1855, Providence, RI, 02912, USA.
authors.forename: Sheila
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bonde
authors.affiliation: School of Engineering, Brown University, Box D, 184 Hope Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA. clyde_briant@brown.edu.
authors.forename: Clyde
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Briant
authors.affiliation: Humanities and Social Sciences, Wentworth Institute of Technology, 550 Huntingdon Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Firenze
authors.affiliation: Research Ethics and Education Policy, Office of the Vice President for Research, Brown University, 47 George Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA.
authors.forename: Julianne
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hanavan
authors.affiliation: Department of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University, Box 1855, Providence, RI, 02912, USA.
authors.forename: Amy
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, 308 Alumni Center, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
authors.forename: Min
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.
authors.forename: N C
authors.initials: NC
authors.lastname: Narayanan
authors.affiliation: Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Parthasarathy
authors.affiliation: School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
authors.forename: Hongqin
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhao
mesh_terms: D002681:China; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000941:ethics; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003469:Culture; D003479:Curriculum; D003657:Decision Making / Q000941:ethics*; D032984:Ethics, Research / Q000193:education*; D006809:Humanities; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D007391:International Cooperation; D007858:Learning; D017145:Models, Educational; D009014:Morals; D012106:Research; D012108:Research Personnel; D012586:Science; D012942:Social Sciences; D013672:Technology; D014481:United States; D014495:Universities
keywords: Assessment; Cultural relativity; Ethics across the curriculum; Ethics training; Research ethics; Responsible conduct of research