Re-envisioning Ethics Access and Community Humanities (R.E.A.C.H.) Initiative: Integrating Community and Curricular Ethics

FAIN: AKB-285835-22

Salisbury University (Salisbury, MD 21801-6837)
Timothy Stock (Project Director: September 2021 to present)
Michele M. Schlehofer (Co Project Director: April 2022 to present)
Jennifer F. Nyland (Co Project Director: April 2022 to present)

A two-year project to implement an integrated ethics curriculum.

The REACH Initiative is a collaboration between the departments of Philosophy, Psychology, and Biology at SU. The humanities are at the center of a reframing of the role and meaning of ethics in undergraduate education at our institution, state-assisted university with a public mission. We bring together, via a slate of new community-sourced resources focused on ethics, two major elements of institutional revision: (i) Curriculum change in the sciences via early exposure to public ethics, and (ii) Community-driven learning, where our immediate community has a say in defining areas of ethical concern. Our implementation will extend the REACH model to four targeted curricular areas: Biology, Honors First Year Seminars, Henson Science Honors and Social Work. We will utilize REACH planning phase outputs to generate resources for faculty implementation in the classroom, assess ethics learning outcomes, and create workshops and internships for our 200-member Community Ethics Network.

Associated Products

The Use of Community Sourced Case Studies to Teach Ethics Across the Curriculum (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Use of Community Sourced Case Studies to Teach Ethics Across the Curriculum
Author: Timothy Stock
Author: Michele Schlehofer
Author: Jennifer Nyland
Abstract: When we teach ethics as part of undergraduate education, to whom are we responsible? Too often, ethical deliberation is constrained to the classroom, and is framed as a tertiary concern (after content and methods) within academic disciplines. Almost universally, student and faculty research in ethics is isolated from community-situated practice and the realities of ethical decision making. We argue that the opposite should be the case: students and scholars of ethics should be engaging directly with community issues, and demonstrating the value of their philosophical training and methods directly to practitioners, organizational leaders, and activists. Ethics teaching materials should be grounded in real-world, local community experiences. In this presentation, we will share the work of the REACH (Re-Envisioning Ethics Access and Community Humanities) Initiative at Salisbury University. The REACH Initiative seeks to foster greater collaborative learning and dialogue centered around ethics in our local community. In the REACH process, we conduct listening sessions with local community leaders, including non-profit, business, local (elected and appointed) government officials, and faith leaders. These sessions are used to explore in a descriptive context the meaning of fundamental ethical concepts (such as justice and fairness) as they apply to actual conflicts, decisions, or situations these community members identify. From these discussions we generate anonymized and/or slightly fictionalized ethics cases that raise for discussion issues of immediate public concern in the greater Salisbury area, while preserving the confidentiality of our discussion group participants. These cases are then implemented as the basis for discussion and reflection activities in classes across the disciplines. In this session, the REACH team will share some of the ethical case studies generated from our local community and present preliminary assessment data on the impact of worki
Date: 02/17/2023
Conference Name: Teaching and Learning Conference, Salisbury University

How Do We Teach What Matters? Community-Based Case Design and Ethics Intervention in the STEM Classroom (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: How Do We Teach What Matters? Community-Based Case Design and Ethics Intervention in the STEM Classroom
Author: Timothy Stock
Abstract: Community enfranchisement in philosophy means philosophers actively seeking to engage with matters of immediate community concern, or that community concerns become the content of philosophical discussion. This includes broadening on-campus ethics discussion to include those issues, conflicts, and injustices that are actually at play in the local community in which the university finds itself. In the context of STEM education, community enfranchisement means that students can identify the ways in which knowledge of science and technology can be directly applied to ethics questions raised by the community. [Our initiative] conducts listening sessions with local community leaders, including non-profit, business, local (elected and appointed) government officials, and faith leaders. These sessions are used to explore in a descriptive context the meaning of fundamental ethical concepts (such as justice and fairness) as they apply to actual conflicts, decisions, or situations these community members identify. From these discussions we generate anonymized and/or fictionalized ethics cases that raise for discussion issues of immediate public concern, while preserving the confidentiality of our discussion group participants (see attached sample case “When to Vaccinate, When to Educate?”). These cases are then implemented as the basis for discussion and reflection activities in several Biology classes as well as a summer undergraduate research seminar for STEM students. Case “drop in” discussions of one hour are available for any instructor on campus to include in their syllabi. Our approach delivers (as students know they are discussion a “live” community issue) increased engagement by students and an increased sense of applicability of course content. Students can more easily see why community-sourced cases matter, and what interventions or research programs might be of benefit. It is a compelling alternative to discussing ethics within the confines of procedural (resea
Date: 01/04/2023
Primary URL: https://www.apaonline.org/page/2023E_TeachingHub
Primary URL Description: American Philosophical Association Teaching Hub Schedule
Conference Name: The American Association of Philosophy Teachers at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting

What is Ethical Enfranchisement? (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: What is Ethical Enfranchisement?
Author: Timothy Stock
Abstract: Epistemic injustice occurs when people are harmed as knowers, especially when we lack the conceptual and interpretive resources to recognize people as knowers of their own experience. This essay addresses the ways in which concerns about epistemic injustice create a positive obligation to include diverse knowers of ethics within the academy. This is ethical enfranchisement, by which we mean expanding the range of constituent people included within ways of knowing ethical concepts, teaching ethics, and making ethical decisions. Thinking about enfranchisement as a model for ethics can move ethics educators from emphasis on formation of beliefs to the creation of social infrastructure. We state that the goals of ethical enfranchisement can be accomplished in part through community-based research [CBR], and a shared epistemic justice framing can align the goals of public philosophy with those of community psychology. CBR is a means to discover novel conceptualizations of ethics, to understand ethical commitments not simply cognitively, but through localities, priorities and stakeholders, and make knowledge responsive to the conceptualizations of ethics as they are actually found in a local community. We establish the obligation to engage communities and claim that this plausibly extends to the university as a whole, as an institution capable of supporting the social infrastructure required for ethical knowledge creation.
Date: 09/29/2022
Conference Name: Democracy Across the Disciplines at the Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement

REACH at Salisbury University: Rationale, Methods, and Major Initiative Roundtable (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: REACH at Salisbury University: Rationale, Methods, and Major Initiative Roundtable
Author: Timothy Stock
Author: Michele Schlehofer
Author: Jennifer Nyland
Abstract: The proposed panel is a field report from the REACH initiative, a program at Salisbury University supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities “Connections” curriculum development grant and the University of Maryland Elkins Professorship. Public philosophy is at the heart of the initiative, which seeks to blend community dialogue around ethics with Community Psychology methods to produce data on priority ethical issues in the area. These data then produce durable materials in the form of case studies that form the basis of faculty development and “drop in” ethics conversations in relevant classes. We are measuring the impact of these sessions on student engagement with ethics across STEM and professional fields. This field report takes place at the mid-point of our grant period (2018-2025) and will cover strategies for planning major public philosophy initiatives, methods of institutionalizing the project beyond the grant timeframe, and with a focus on sustainable community partnerships. Throughout the presentation we will focus on the problem of approaching ethics across disciplines and professions and propose community partnership as a means of transforming disciplinary and interprofessional relationships and de-siloing understandings of ethics on our campus.
Date: 01/06/24
Conference Name: American Philosophical Association

Town-Gown Relationships as Opportunities for Ethical Enfranchisement: Evidence from Salisbury University’s REACH Initiative (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Town-Gown Relationships as Opportunities for Ethical Enfranchisement: Evidence from Salisbury University’s REACH Initiative
Author: Michele Schlehofer
Author: Timothy Stock
Author: Jennifer Nyland
Abstract: Learning Outcomes: (1) Understand the concept of “ethical enfranchisement” and how ethics can be a source of campus-community exchange (2) Know how community-driven work can deepen trust in institutions of higher education and improve town-gown relationships (3) Learn the value of interdisciplinary approaches to advance town-gown relationships (4) Recognize important considerations and decision-points when advancing community-university partnerships This presentation provides an overview of the REACH initiative, an interdisciplinary program at Salisbury University which embodies campus-community partnerships around ethics. REACH creates space for ethical “enfranchisement”: participatory work to establish ethical frameworks for community decision-making and shared priorities for campus conversations. The REACH “listening first” process and the model’s impact on our campus and broader community will be reviewed, along with considerations for institutions looking to replicate the approach.
Date: 06/01/24
Conference Name: International Town-Gown Association Conference

Building inclusive cultures through community research. In Building inclusive ethical cultures in STEM (Article)
Title: Building inclusive cultures through community research. In Building inclusive ethical cultures in STEM
Author: Jennifer Nyland
Author: Timothy Stock
Author: Michele Schlehofer
Abstract: The science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classroom is an ideal site for implementing community-based ethics resources. Doing so fulfills programmatic requirements in the social reality of science and demonstrates increased applicability of science concepts to issues of immediate community concern. This chapter elaborates on the Re-envisioning Ethics Access and Community Humanities (REACH) initiative at Salisbury University, its community research methodology, and the implementation of community-sourced ethics cases in the biology classroom. Preliminary student and instructor feedback is summarized. As opposed to using more traditional ethics resources, such as cases sourced from the national media or case-based ethics readers, the use of community-based cases demonstrates promise in increasing student engagement in discussion, the applicability of course content, and a sense of the social importance of science in addressing contemporary ethics issues. We end with future implications of this pedagogical approach for revising ethics instruction in the STEM classroom.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-51560-6_19
Format: Other
Publisher: Springer

What is ethical enfranchisement? Community research and the social infrastructure of ethics. (Article)
Title: What is ethical enfranchisement? Community research and the social infrastructure of ethics.
Author: Timothy Stock
Author: Michele Schlehofer
Author: Jennifer Nyland
Abstract: Epistemic injustice occurs when people are harmed as knowers, especially when we lack the conceptual and interpretive resources to recognize people as knowers of their own experience. This essay addresses the ways in which concerns about epistemic injustice create a positive obligation to include diverse knowers of ethics within the academy and models a community-based alternative. This is ethical enfranchisement, by which we mean expanding the range of people included within ways of knowing ethical concepts, reflecting on the way people’s experiences are represented in ethical discourse, and allowing priority ethical conversations to be identified by community research. The goal of teaching ethics through enfranchisement is the creation of social infrastructure and exchange between community and classroom. We describe our Re-envisioning Ethics Access and Community Humanities (REACH) Initiative at Salisbury University as an example; a community-based research partnership between public philosophy and community psychology in descriptive ethics. We also explore the obligation held by ethics professionals and academics to enfranchise community members in their conceptualization of ethical concepts, priorities, and knowledge.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://www.pdcnet.org/p4/content/p4_2023_0999_12_6_25
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Publisher: Precollege Philosophy and Public Practice (Philosophy Documentation Center)

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