Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility
Ethical Identity and Imagination
Student Leadership Workshop
October 1, 2009
2:00-5:00 pm
Minneapolis, Minnesota
This workshop, designed for students, was held at the Hilton Minneapolis, just prior to AAC&U's Network for Academic Renewal Meeting, Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments, October 1-3, 2009.
Workshop Themes
Workshop Program
Conference Participation
Concurrent Session
Participants in this workshop will explore how to competently and courageously position themselves in support of a more ethical and just world. The workshop will focus on building skills for collaborative leadership and engage participants in complex moral dilemmas, practice ethical evaluation and decision-making, and share strategies for bringing ethical considerations into their private, public, and professional lives.
Workshop Themes
Ethical Identity
Developing ethical competence involves complexity, courage, commitment, creativity, and conviction:
- Embracing the complexity of interpersonal, local, and global interdependence.
- Cultivating the courage to consider changing one’s values and beliefs.
- Making the commitment to explore the implications of new knowledge for action.
- Nurturing a moral imagination that refuses to ignore ambiguity.
- Developing convictions and taking a stand despite uncertainty.
Workshop Program
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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1 |
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2:00-2:10 pm |
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Framing Remarks — What does Ethics have to do with Imagination?
The difficult aspects of ethics move far beyond differentiating between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and then executing the ‘right’ decision. This workshop assumes that every moment in life has an ethical dimension and there is no option of abstaining or staying neutral. As Howard Zinn puts it: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” But this difficult human condition also has immense potential: if every moment in life has an ethical dimension, then every moment holds an opportunity to create a more ethical world …
Michèle Leaman, Program Associate, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives, AAC&U |
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2:10-2:30 pm |
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Holding the World Responsible: The Global Impact of Student Advocacy and Activism
What are our responsibilities as students? What are our rights? What can students accomplish? Speaking from her own experience with the Eastern European student revolutions in the late 1980s, Ligia demonstrates the incredible societal impact that student movements have had globally. This speech investigates student organizations as major drivers of social change, and outlines what students and student organizations can do, in order to continue to play a prominent role in building sustainable, just, and democratic societies. Contemporary challenges and ethical dilemmas around students' representative roles in (academic) society will be discussed in the form of case studies.
Ligia Deca, Chairperson, European Students' Union
European Students’ Union (ESU)
The European Students’ Union (ESU) is an umbrella organization of 49 National Unions of Students (NUS) from 38 countries. The NUSes are open to all students in their respective country regardless of political persuasion, religion, ethnic or cultural origin, sexual orientation or social standing. Our members are also student-run, autonomous representatives that operate according to democratic principles.
The aim of ESU is to represent and promote the educational, social, economic and cultural interests of students at the European level towards all relevant bodies and in particular the European Union, Bologna Follow Up Group, Council of Europe, and UNESCO. Through its members, ESU represents over 11 million students in Europe. We work to bring together and train national student representatives on policy developments in higher education at the European level. Since decisions concerning higher education are increasingly made at the European level, ESU’s role as the only European-wide student platform is similarly growing. Our work centers around supporting our members through organizing seminars, campaigns, and conferences relevant to students; conducting European-wide research, partnership projects, and campaigns; as well as producing a variety of publications for students, policy-makers, and higher education professionals.
For more information please visit our website at www.esu-online.org.
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2:30-2:50 pm |
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Q&A with Ligia |
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2:50- 3:50 pm |
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Unscripted! Experience the Interactive Performance Lab
During the interactive performance lab activity, participants may "play roles" for the purpose of exploring ethical identities. Children have license to play. As we mature, we take on roles until we forget that we are playing and come to think of our roles as "who we are." We will create experiences that reestablish the license to play in ways that are both illuminating and empowering.
The power of playing these fictional scenarios lies in the opportunity to take risks without consequence. By allowing participants to play as characters other than themselves, they are freed to "walk in another's shoes" and thus build understanding beyond their own personal perspectives.
Jeff Wirth, Founder and Director of the Interactive Performance Lab, University of Central Florida, Department of Digital Media |
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3:50-4:00 pm |
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Refreshment break |
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4:00-4:50 pm |
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Unscripted! Experience the Interactive Performance Lab – Continued |
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4:50-5:00 pm |
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Debriefing the Day and Conference Activities
Michèle Leaman, Program Associate, Office of Diversity, Equity, and Global Initiatives, AAC&U |
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Student Participation in the Larger Conference
For those participants staying for the main conference, the workshop leaders will highlight sessions that might be of particular interest to students. Additionally, daily check-in and networking activities will be scheduled to enable students to reconnect with each other throughout the conference and to facilitate continued discussion about the complexities of and need for developing ethical identity and imagination.
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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2 |
12:30 pm |
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Lunch at nearby restaurants. Please bring some cash. |
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2:15-3:45 pm |
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Prep for Concurrent Session - Optional
The Five Minute Ethical Autobiography
To get us started, please take five minutes to reflect on and write down a few thoughts in response to following prompt:
Recall an experience in your life where you had a strong reaction to a situation that concerned being ethical. This could have been a time where you felt overjoyed or outraged. Pick a situation that really mattered to you; it may have happened a long time ago or recently. Please write descriptively about the details of this situation. Describe how you looked, what you were wearing, the setting, etc. Where were you? What were the events leading up to this situation? What was the issue at stake? Who had power? Who was listening and/or watching? What did you say? What were you thinking? What physical sensations can you remember? |
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4:15-5:30 pm |
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Concurrent session: - Optional
Guerrilla Ethics: Building Creative Alliances across the Academy
We are all familiar with the blame game that takes place between faculty, students, student affairs, and administrators. We know that shared responsibility is required to shape the ethical climates in our classrooms and residence halls, on our campuses, and in our communities, both locally and globally. However, we’ve also experienced the pitfall that “if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.”
This discussion session will explore ways to build more effective alliances between students, faculty, student affairs, and administrators; taking seriously each others’ perspectives and paying attention to complex dynamics of power and privilege. It will be led by students who participated in Thursday’s student workshop on ethical identity and imagination. Participants will address questions such as: What do more ethical and responsible relationships, classrooms, structures, communities, and institutions look like? Can we imagine more ethical ways of learning, thinking, and acting together, across the divisions created by the hierarchical academy? The session will offer scenarios for “moral rehearsal” that will provide insight into ethical dilemmas of every day academic life together and practice in negotiating them.
Students from the Pre-Conference Leadership Workshop on Ethical Identity and Imagination; Jeff Wirth, Founder and Director of the Interactive Performance Lab, University of Central Florida, Department of Digital Media; and Michèle Leaman, Program Associate, Office of Diversity, Equity and Global Initiatives, AAC&U |
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5:30 pm |
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Democracy Forum:
The Democracy Movement, Student Engagement, and Higher Education's Role
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7:00 pm |
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Dinner at nearby restaurant |
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3 |
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8:00 am |
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Meet for breakfast. Opportunity to share impressions of the conference, exchange ideas, resources, and contact information. |
By participating in this conference, students will join and contribute to a national conversation regarding campus commitments to education for personal and social responsibility. Students will be active and vocal participants of the entire conference.
The program will feature promising practices that develop students’ civic engagement and social responsibility in both a local and global context; personal and academic integrity; ability to examine and understand differing (and often competing) perspectives; as well as the centrality of ethical and moral reasoning in these processes.
For more information about the Network Conference, click here.
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