JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - Naspaa

Information Literacy in Public Affairs Curriculumabout these matters. It is essential to teach students competent reasoning skillsfor handling the types of ethical matters they might face in their professions orpersonal lives.To meet these challenges, one course objective uses skills that ordinarilyare taught in a philosophy course, so that students learn to reason about theethical matters that public administrators might realistically encounter. In theclassroom, these skills are taught through student-led discussions, professor-ledcross-examinations, student-to-student instructions, staged debates, defense ofdisagreeable positions, and other devices aimed at separating students from theiremotive commitment to a particular view. The idea is to develop the student’sability to provide a full and fair presentation of a situation.While course details vary from year to year, the core structure remains thesame. The early weeks are designed to loosen the students’ notions of ethics awayfrom any naïve notions they may have. This is accomplished largely by exposingthem to views outside their norm, which include things like (a) addressingthe Aristotelian view exhibited in the Kurosawa-directed film Ikiru [To Life](1952), (b) defending the views of George Washington Plunkitt (Riordon,1982), (c) reading Goodsell’s In Defense of Bureaucracy (1985), and (d) readingHoles (Sachar, 2000), a young-adult fiction work that portrays juvenile justiceissues. A simpler student eye-opening method is exposure to other people’sviews of potentially important moral issues. To do this, students bring in alocal newspaper clipping that presents an issue of interest. National news itemsare not allowed, so that the subject remains localized to personal interests. Forthe online course, a URL link serves as the “clipping.” The purpose of this“loosening” effect is to provide students with a broader understanding of theirbasic environment and help them gain perspective. We expect this ultimatelycreates public servants with a foundation of strength, and fosters a sensible,open-minded approach to the reasoning process.Next, a research project on an ethical dilemma begins. This semester-longproject is woven through the ongoing process, where students are learning orrelearning the more difficult decision-making tactics. About halfway through thesemester, each student submits a research project proposal that aims to discussand attempts to resolve the ethical dilemma chosen in earlier weeks.To qualify as “ethical,” the problem must be one that cannot be resolvedby knowing more facts — it must lack a ready-made answer. To qualify as a“dilemma,” a problem must have at least two plausible solutions. Quite often,students choose an issue with many possible solutions, but have no idea whichone they ultimately will support. Other times they start out as totally unable tosee any possible answers to the issue. Regardless, the professor advises the classthat he is good at “smoking out” people with “false” dilemmas, where studentsuse the paper-writing assignment as an opportunity to craft a polemic in favor ofone predetermined view.Journal of Public Affairs Education 285