Making Choices: Ethical Decisions in a Global Context

Sheila Bonde, Clyde Briant, Paul Firenze, Julianne Hanavan, Amy Huang, Min Li, N. C. Narayanan, D. Parthasarathy, Hongqin Zhao

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.