The Interprofessional Education Collaborative’s (IPEC’s) core competencies are accreditation standards of most, if not all, healthcare professions (Interprofessional Education Collaborative Expert Panel [2016, Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice: 2016 Update. Washington, DC: IPEC]). Limited literature exists on interprofessional (IP) learning outcomes in healthcare ethics; even fewer studies include debrief sessions. Interprofessional education (IPE) case discussion using web-based technology is a promising way to incorporate ethics content. This article summarizes a model for healthcare programs to create, conduct, and assess synchronous IPE ethics discussions and debrief sessions. Specifically, this article highlights debrief sessions that followed a standardized patient (SP) IP interaction with students from pharmacy and advanced practice nursing. Qualitative analysis of debrief comments identified four themes: the benefit of IP collaboration, the importance of patient-centered care, the need to adapt clinical recommendations with ethical challenges, and the importance of trust among team members. The findings indicate web-based, synchronous IP/SP ethics simulations and debrief sessions are an effective, albeit laborious, method for collaboration and reflection.

Viewing difficulty as an opportunity for learning runs counter to the common view of difficulty as a source of frustration and confusion. The aim of this article is to focus on the idea of difficulty as a stepping-off point for learning. The literature on difficulty in reading texts, and its impact on thinking and the interpretive process, serve as a foundation for the use of poetry in healthcare ethics education. Because of its complexity and strangeness compared to the usual scientific and clinical texts health science students encounter, poetry is an excellent means to achieve the aim of thinking through difficulties in ethics. Specific examples of teaching and learning strategies for turning difficulty into opportunities for learning are presented, including the difficulty paper and the triple mark-up method. Both methods require students to examine their process of working through difficulties, reflect on how they make sense of difficult texts and then share their process and interpretations in a collaborative manner with peers. The importance of framing difficulties as a public, visible, collaborative process rather than a personal process is emphasized. Working together to hypothesize reasons for difficulty and map out plans to come to terms with difficulty are equally relevant for reading text as they are for reading complex ethical situations. Finally, I argue that transference of this kind of personal and collaborative learning about difficulties benefits interprofessional clinical practice, particularly when dealing with ethical issues.

In this article, we present an educational intervention that embeds ethics education within research laboratories. This structure is designed to assist students in addressing ethical challenges in a more informed way, and to improve the overall ethical culture of research environments. The project seeks (a) to identify factors that students and researchers consider relevant to ethical conduct in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and (b) to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific, ethics-based guidelines. An important assumption behind this approach is that direct involvement in the process of developing laboratory specific ethical guidelines will positively influence researchers’ understanding of ethical research and practice issues, their handling of these issues, and the promotion of an ethical culture in the respective laboratory. The active involvement may increase the sense of ownership and integration of further discussion on these important topics. Based on the project experiences, the project team seeks to develop a module involving the bottom-up building of codes-of-ethics-based guidelines that can be used by a broad range of institutions and that will be distributed widely.

A common goal of ethics education is to equip students who later become health practitioners to not only know about the ethical principles guiding their practice, but to also autonomously recognize when and how these principles might apply and assist these future practitioners in providing care for patients and families. This article aims to contribute to discussions about ethics education pedagogy and teaching, by presenting and evaluating the use of the visual arts as an educational approach designed to facilitate students’ moral imagination and independent critical thinking about ethics in clinical practice. We describe a sequence of ethics education strategies over a 3 year Doctor of Physiotherapy program, focusing on the final year professional ethics assessment task, which involved the use of visual arts to stimulate the exploration of ethics in healthcare. The data (in the form of student essays about their chosen artwork) were analyzed using both thematic and content analysis. Two key themes centered on emotional responses and lateral thinking. The use of artwork appeared to facilitate imaginative, emotional, and conceptual thinking about ethics and clinical experience (both past and future). This study provides some evidence to support the effectiveness of the use of the visual arts in promoting students’ recognition of ethical dimensions within their clinical experience and reflection on their emerging professional identity. As one student noted, she left the museum “somewhat changed.”

This article describes the well-developed and long-standing medical ethics teaching programs in both of New Zealand’s medical schools at the University of Otago and the University of Auckland. The programs reflect the awareness that has been increasing as to the important role that ethics education plays in contributing to the “professionalism” and “professional development” in medical curricula.

Using a sample of 72 European and 22 North American educational institutions, we examine the extent to which business schools in North America and Europe are driving educational programs and initiatives in corporate social responsibility and sustainability (CSRS). Drawing on several theoretical perspectives, such as institutional-comparative perspectives and resource dependence theory, the study indicates the increasing prominence of CSRS education in business schools on both continents. It does so through analysis of the extent to which business schools offer (a) dedicated CSRS programs, (b) CSRS tracks and majors, (c) compulsory CSRS classes or modules, and (d) optional CSRS modules across the range of taught programs. Contrary to some previous findings, religious affiliation, public/private status, and program size had only a negligible direct association with schools' commitment to CSRS education. However, business school prestige showed a statistically significant relationship. Finally, the study highlights how European respondents' perceptions concerning the primary drivers and constraints of CSRS initiatives differed from those in North America.

The aim of this section is to expand and accelerate advances in methods of teaching bioethics. Bioethics educators are invited to send submissions to T. Kushner at kushnertk@gmail.com.