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【CM CSR】“Perception is more important than Right or Wrong” - Dr. Jack Chih-Yuan Wang’s talk on ethics education

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When talking about ethics courses, most people intuitively think that it is all about teaching people how to make judgments of right and wrong. As a matter of fact, the essence of such courses is to cultivate students’ ethical awareness and their moral analysis and decision-making abilities. Dr. Jack Chih-Yuan Wang, Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Management, points out that the course titled “Ethics, Leadership, and Decision” offered by the College of Management gives students a chance to bring up ethical issues that they personally detected through sharing of different cases. They also get an opportunity to conduct analysis on multiple dimensions identified through discussions and provide feedback on ethical incidents. He acknowledges that “I’m aware that people respond differently to specific situations, but I sincerely hope that everyone acts in accordance with his or her conscience.” 
 
Professor Wang has adopted experiential learning as his teaching approach for this course. Students engage in discussions and analysis of different material including cases, movies, and scenarios and form opinions on different levels through brainstorming activities. Ethical incidents are omnipresent in daily life. However, since his students lack or have very limited work experience, Professor Wang familiarizes them with key concepts and principles of business ethics to facilitate their understanding of the different scenarios. He also shares his methods for dealing with classroom situations in which students are unable to grasp the core of the teaching materials:
  • Acting as a facilitator: Through leading questions or extension of student statements, students are guided to the main discussion theme and the discussions are redirected to the original lesson design.
  • Preserving flexibility: Sometimes the discussions in the classroom go off on a tangent and the new topic is also worth examining. Professor Wang is willing to abandon the original subject and explore the new issue if required based on a firm belief in the importance of enabling students to gain new insights from every classroom session. Every meaningful subject can be further examined in his course. 
  • Active intervention: If students are not very well-prepared for his classes and don’t have a clear understanding of the scenarios, he directly initiates the case analysis to ensure stable learning results in each session.
 
At the end of the course, students are required to shoot a video based on a selected ethical issue related to business management. They present their analysis sequence and behavior decisions based on the knowledge acquired in the course. In this process, Professor Wang observes the students to determine whether they possess ethical awareness. 
 
In view of the growing emphasis on ethical issues in business management education, Professor Wang offers the following three suggestions to first-time instructors of ethics courses: “Try to think outside the box”, “relax and enjoy your interactions and intellectual sparring with your students”, and “try to dip into knowledge outside your professional field”, and try to provide students with more information to facilitate their discussions. Professor Wang highly recommends that the College provides a unified platform which allows instructors of ethics courses to share materials (e.g., cases presented in class, relevant literature and videos). This would enable instructors to exchange different resources and teaching methods for the same issues. He also argues that the organization of ethics related competitions and activities would motivate students to participate and expose themselves to ethical issues, and thereby gain a better understanding of the importance of ethical awareness and develop analysis and decision-making abilities.
 

 

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