Give Students the Opportunity to Take the Lead
Post submitted by Paula Mirk, MEd. Mirk has worked at whole child partner the Institute for Global Ethics (IGE) since 1996 and currently oversees the IGE education department's many initiatives, including the Ethical Literacy expanding community of schools.
We call it Ethical Fitness®: an approach and process to help young people and adults internalize ethical values and frameworks for critical thinking about ethics. Like physical fitness, we believe Ethical Fitness comes about through discovery and constructing knowledge. We discourage a didactic approach to ethics because it risks reducing a deeply meaningful topic to one that is dry, passive, and boring. It's also ineffective.
A visit to the Ethical Literacy website confirms the creative, energetic ways that students naturally engage in the "study of what's right and what's good." In an effort to educate their entire school community about this dimension to preparing for the future, students have
- Engaged peers in a discovery process to determine their core ethical values.