Case text

Cases, cases and more cases

What I heard: If someone teaches ethics, they are using cases, and a lot of them. Most said that Prindle Post articles are good, but are often too high-level for teachers to want to use. They prefer the types of cases that Ethics Unwrapped provides. They are also using cases we have written, ethics bowl cases and cases from debate-prep websites. Most of the educators said that it’s important that the cases be relevant to their students’ lives and interests, and that they cover current events or can be linked to current events. Others emphasized the importance of the cases touching on other subject matter, like learning about the constitution, etc. Many mentioned that being able to look up cases by topic is useful.

Recommendation: We focus heavily on creating cases for use in the classroom and publishing them on our website in a user-friendly manner. We’ve done this before with student interns writing cases based on Prindle Post articles, but the quantity was pretty low. It also took a lot of work to get the cases written in the first place (with some exceptions of course!). If we wanted to try and produce a large number of cases, I think we could have students writing cases in addition to freelancers (perhaps pulled from the News Analyst pool) writing cases. I also think we could have certain writers and freelancers re-writing older cases as time passes to fit better with what teachers are wanting to teach.

I think there’s a way to continue creating similar resources to the ones Eleanor and I were working on for a while last summer: https://www.prindleinstitute.org/courses/sip-carefully/

Resources required: Budget to hire freelancers, time for Christiane to figure out how best to present the cases on the website

Discussion prompts for the case

sample questions here