GEN499 Ashford Globalization Ethics & Moral Development Discussion Questions Discussion Question 1
Globalization and Its Ethical Implications [WLOs: 1, 2, 3, 5] [CLOs: 1, 2, 3, 5]
Prepare: Prior to beginning work on this discussion forum, review the following Week 1 and Week 2 required resources that focus on globalization, ethics, and moral reasoning. This will assist you in examining your own development of ethical and moral responsibilities as they relate to your Final Paper and its topic.
Read these articles from Week 1:
From Globalism to Globalization: The Politics of Resistance
Globalization, Globalism, and Cosmopolitanism as an Educational Ideal
Transnationalism and Anti-globalism
Read these articles from Week 2:
Introduction to Global Issues
A Global Ethics for a Globalized World
Virtue Ethics and Modern Society
Classical Stoicism and the Birth of a Global Ethics: Cosmopolitan Duties in a World of Local Loyalties
Reflect: The change of our world from a local economy to a national economy to a global, international economy means that increasingly diverse populations will have to work together to achieve common goals. However, as the economy becomes increasingly global, local economies and people may suffer economic disadvantage or may find themselves marginalized from the rest of the world. Globalization creates ethical dilemmas for which we will need to find solutions.
Write: For this discussion, address the following prompts:
Explain the implications of globalization.
Identify at least two ethical issues that go along with the global societal topic you have chosen for your final essay.
Explain how globalization contributes to or affects these ethical dilemmas.
Propose solutions to these ethical dilemmas that are feasible financially, socially, and culturally.
Your initial post should be at least 250 words in length, which should include a thorough response to each prompt. You are required to provide in-text citations of applicable required reading materials and/or any other outside sources you use to support your claims. Provide full reference entries of all sources cited at the end of your response. Please use correct APA format when writing in-text citations (see In-Text Citation Helper (Links to an external site.)) and references (see Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.)).
Discussion Question 2
Ethics and Moral Development [WLOs: 1, 2, 3] [CLOs: 1, 2, 3]
Prepare: Prior to beginning work on this discussion forum, review the Week 2 required resources that focus on ethics and morals. This will assist you in examining your own development of ethical and moral responsibilities.
Read the articles:
A Global Ethics for a Globalized World
Virtue Ethics and Modern Society
Classical Stoicism and the Birth of a Global Ethics: Cosmopolitan Duties in a World of Local Loyalties
Responsibilities of an Educated Person (Links to an external site.) [Blog post] by jwood00
Moral Education for a Society in Moral Transition (Links to an external site.)
Decision Procedures for Ethics: DEAL Carrying on Without Resolution (Links to an external site.)
Reflect: Take a deeper look at your own life and determine which experiences have inspired ethical and moral reasoning. Were there any huge influences in this process?
Write: For this discussion you will address the following prompts:
Explain what it means to be ethical as it relates to personal, academic, and professional growth.
Provide at least one ethical dilemma you have encountered, and describe how the issue was resolved.
Describe how your general education courses have influenced your ethical values.
Your initial post should be at least 250 words in length, which should include a thorough response to each prompt. You are required to provide in-text citations of applicable required reading materials and/or any other outside sources you use to support your claims. Provide full reference entries of all sources cited at the end of your response. Please use correct APA format when writing in-text citations (see In-Text Citation Helper (Links to an external site.)) and references (see Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.)).
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AVAILABLE:
Jwood00. (2017, December 18). Responsibilities of an educated person (Links to an external site.) [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://jwood00.hubpages.com/hub/Responsibilities-o…
The author makes the case that an educated person’s responsibilities and duties extend beyond the family and work place and must be extended into a wider context that includes others in the world and into the future. These responsibilities grow from the wider and deeper breadth of knowledge that comes from a college education. This article will assist you with your Ethics and Moral Development discussion this week.
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The Blogxer. (2012, March 17). Responsibilities of an educated person (Links to an external site.) [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://enlighten-me-not.blogspot.com/2012/03/respo…
The blog provides the three main responsibilities that educated persons must take on. These responsibilities are an outgrowth of their education and can be the basis for helping make the world a better place for everyone. This article will assist you with your Ethics and Moral Development discussion this week.
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FINAL PAPER RESEARCH TOPICS: I have not selected a topic yet, choose one from the three below that you want to work with for these discussion questions and I will use that for my final paper topic.
Lack of education
Unemployment and lack of economic opportunity
Poverty and income inequality What Will It Mean To Be An Educated
Person in Mid-21st Century?
____________
Carl Bereiter
Institute for Knowledge Innovation
Marlene Scardamalia
University of Toronto
____________
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
What should distinguish an educated person of mid-21st century from the
educated person of a century earlier? Unfortunately, the most straightforward answer
consists of a number of added specifications with very little compensating elimination of
older ones. New technology is downgrading certain technical skills such as penmanship,
ability to do long division, and ability to thread a movie projector; but the academic
content and competencies set out in the 1959 Case for Basic Education (Koerner, 1959)
remain as important now as then, along with challenging new content and additional
competencies that now demand attention. And some of the 1959 wisdom rings more
tellingly now than it did back then, particularly Clifton Fadiman’s words about
“generative” subjects that enable future learning and about the value of education in
saving students from feeling lost, in enabling them to feel “at home in the world”
(Fadiman, 1959, p. 11). Rather than approaching the question with an additive mindset,
however, we attempt in this paper to approach it in a way that is open to possibilities of
transformation in educational ends and means.
The coming decades are likely to see the individual learner having to share space
with the group as the unit of analysis in teaching and assessment. There are legitimate
senses in which learning not only take places in groups but is a group phenomenon
(Stahl, 2006): Group learning is something beyond the learning undergone by members
of the group; it is something only definable and measurable at the group level. There are
legitimate and important senses in which groups understand (or fail to understand),
develop expertise, act, solve problems, and demonstrate creativity (Sawyer, 2003). While
the title of this chapter indicates a focus on the individual, much of what we have to say
is shaped by the larger question, “What will it mean to be an educated society in mid-21st
century?”
A Different Kind of Person?
In speculating on what it will mean to be an educated person in the middle of the
21st century, the first question to consider is whether mid-21st century people will be
different kinds of persons from their 20th century counterparts. There is much talk about
brains being “rewired” by game playing and cell phone use. Without venturing into such
speculation, we can note potentially far-reaching behavioral changes resulting from new
The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
kinds of social communication. There is the social website phenomenon of “friending,”
which leads to vastly expanded circles of putative friends compared to the usual networks
of direct contacts. Whether these constitute friendship in the normal sense may be
questioned, but what is most evident is the extent to which communication in these social
media is person-centered in contrast to being idea-centered. This shift is something of
potentially major educational and perhaps cultural consequence, and we return to it
briefly at the end of this chapter, in a section titled “Will Technology Facilitate Becoming
an Educated Person?”. Related to it, and also of potential profound consequence, is the
trend toward short messages without the continuity of ordinary conversation. Short,
mostly discontinuous messages also characterize text-messaging and the commenting that
pervades blogs and Web news sites. As technology evolves enabling speech to play a
larger role in online communication, the trend toward brevity may be reversed, but it
could mean even farther distancing from the “essayist technique” that has been the
medium of extended reflective thought (Olson, 1977). Extreme personalization and
fragmentary communication would appear to be antithetical to what quality education has
traditionally stood for. Are they really? And if they are, how should education respond to
them?
The consequences of a shift toward greater person-centeredness are indefinite
enough at this time that they may look favorable to some and dismal to others. A standing
joke these days is Facebook denizens reporting what they (or sometimes their dog) are
having for dinner. It does appear that much of the content appearing on social sites and
personal blogs can only matter to people who have a personal interest in the author. A
similar trend may be detected in contemporary poetry; whereas at one time you needed a
classical education to understand the allusions in a poem, now you often need to know
the poet. What is being lost here is the drive toward expansive meaning that characterizes
the arts and scholarly disciplines. It may be that this is a good thing; it is consistent with
post-modern skepticism about grand narratives. But it certainly gives a different meaning
to “well-educated” from what it had a century ago.
The trend toward shorter, more fragmentary communication has more direct
implications for ability to meet the intellectual challenges of this century. Can the
increasingly complex problems of 21st-century societies be solved by sound bites? The
The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
answer is surely no, yet utterances of 15 seconds or less are already taking over political
discourse while, maddeningly, legislation is getting longer. Although we have not seen
any systematic evidence on the matter, numerous Internet bloggers remark on the
paradox of books and other media getting longer while ability to sustain attention over
long stretches is getting shorter. Quite possibly these are not divergent trends but
different manifestations of the same trend, which is a declining ability to do the sustained
integrative thinking that can on one hand tighten prose around essential ideas and on the
other hand enable readers to process complex texts. The proof will come if speech-to-text
becomes the preferred medium of asynchronous communication: Will it result in more
extended thought or will it tend to bury thought under transcribed babble?
Text is gradually being replaced by hypertext—coherent texts that contain
abundant clickable links to related information sources. The virtues of hypertext are
obvious to anyone researching a topic on the Internet, but it does pose a heightened
challenge to focus. Following a link to a source that contains additional links, following
one of those, and so on can quickly lead to loss of one’s original purpose. Improved
media design may make it easier to recover one’s line of thought, but ultimately the
challenge is an educational one: to heighten metacognitive awareness, to help students
keep cognitive purposes in mind and to evaluate their current mental states against them.
This is but one example of what promises to become a growing educational challenge: to
promote sustained work with ideas. Society needs it, new media provide both tools and
diversions from it, and schools have scarcely begun to recognize the challenge. Sustained
work with ideas also poses a challenge for educational technology design, but one that
has not yet come into clear focus for developers. Hopefully this will change. We are
currently working on design of a new digital knowledge-building environment that has a
person-oriented space for social interaction around ideas but in addition an “idea level”
where ideas abstracted from the social space become objects of inquiry, development,
and improvement—where what goes on may be described as ideas interacting with ideas
rather than people interacting with people.
The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
Education’s Two Faces
Being an educated person has traditionally had two aspects, one representing
academic knowledge and skills and the other representing personal qualities—traits of
character or intellect that the educational process is supposed to develop. Recent futureoriented literature has shown a definite tilt toward the second aspect, now described by
such terms as “higher-order,” “21st-century,” or “soft” skills, “habits of mind,” and
“literacies.” Reasons for the tilt toward personal qualities are not difficult to discern.
There is the rapid growth of knowledge, which makes mastery of any subject increasingly
beyond reach and renders knowledge increasingly vulnerable to obsolescence. There is
the ready availability of factual information via Web search engines, which reduces the
need to store declarative knowledge in memory. And then there is the general uncertainty
about what the future will demand of people, thus raising doubt about the value of
specific knowledge and “hard” skills and favoring more broadly defined educational
objectives such as “learning to learn,” “critical thinking,” “communication skills,” and
“creativity.” These, it can be assumed, will always be useful. In practical educational
terms, however, this is also a tilt away from things that teachers know how to teach with
some degree of effectiveness to objectives of questionable teachability.
The scope of the term “educated” may be narrowly limited to testable knowledge
and skills or expanded to include everything that constitutes being a good citizen. Real
life requires that people not only have knowledge but that they be willing and able to act
upon it. This has multiple implications for the kinds of life experiences that constitute
growing up into active citizenship, although it is not evident that times are changing in
this respect. Many educators will argue that there is increasing need for students to
eschew violence, honor diversity, and free their thinking of racism, sexism, homophobia,
ethnocentrism and other prejudices. They will therefore want to include these in any
description of an educated person. It must be recognized, however, that throughout
history there have been well-educated people who demonstrated none of these qualities
and were sometimes notable for their opposites. The standard rejoinder is that such
people could not have been well educated; but we do not believe it is wise to burden the
term “educated” with every desirable human quality. Better to acknowledge that there is
more to being a good person than being well educated. One can go to virtually any poor
The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
village and find uneducated people who are paragons. Eliminating moral perfection from
the definition of an educated person does not, however, mean eliminating emotions,
beliefs, mindsets, and moral reasoning from consideration. On the contrary, it frees us to
consider in a constructive way the role that these may play in cognitive processes, along
with knowledge, skills, and aptitudes. A lot more is known about this interplay today than
was known back when “higher-order skills” first came on the stage, and in the following
discussion we attempt to draw on this recently developed knowledge.
Knowledge and Knowledgeability
The status of knowledge in what is frequently called the “Knowledge Age” is
ambiguous. Everyone is of course in favor of knowledge but knowledgeability, the
retention of knowledge in individual nervous systems, has come under scrutiny, for
reasons already stated. A legitimate sub-question to What will it mean to be an educated
person in mid-21st century? is the question, What will it mean to be a knowledgeable
person in mid-21st century? An answer to this question divides into three parts, each of
which poses both assessment and instructional problems.
21st century subject matter. Over the course of educational history, new subjects
have from time to time been adopted as essential, and more rarely a subject may be
dropped. Science made its way into the curriculum against some resistance, and now is
raised close to the top. The late 20th century saw ecology and cultural studies entering the
list. Computer programming came and went as an element of general education—and
may be on its way back again (cf. Resnick, et al., 2009). Probability, statistics, and
graphical representation of data, which were largely absent in mid-20th century schooling,
are now essential for following the daily news. Not yet fully arrived in the curriculum are
complex systems theory and mathematical modeling, although these are arguably
essential for advanced work in virtually any discipline.
Identifying important new subject matter has been something curriculum planners
have been doing energetically ever since the Sputnik era. Identifying what it will take for
adequate knowledgeability in the present century calls, however, for more complex
analysis. It is not enough to identify topics that are worthy of instruction. We need to
identify where schooled knowledge is falling short of emerging needs. For instance,
The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
“financial literacy” is a need brought into the spotlight by current economic problems.
However, proposals currently on the table are focused on personal finance. Important as
this may be, people can be knowledgeable about their personal finances—knowing how
to recognize and avoid high-interest traps, for instance—and still be financially illiterate
when it comes to national economic policy. In fact, using one’s personal financial
wisdom as a paradigm for judging governmental policies is a serious and all too common
mistake; it leads to a simple-minded “thrift” approach that ignores macroeconomic
effects on currency, inflation, employment, and level of consumer spending. Economics,
like practically everything else of societal importance, needs to be understood
systemically—and that is what most strikingly distinguishes 21st-century
knowledgeability from what could serve adequately in times past.
Depth of understanding. Teaching for understanding is widely advocated.
Knowledge tests are being reshaped to test for it, with less emphasis on testing factual
recall. But when it comes to assessing depth of understanding, educational assessment
does not seem to have progressed significantly beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956). The
Taxonomy cast the problem in behavioral terms: “Specifically, what does a student do
who ‘really understands’ which he does not do when he does not understand?” (p.1)
Accordingly, depth was operationalized by a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated
things students might do with their knowledge: applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and
evaluating. This approach was further developed in a revision of the Taxonomy
(Anderson & Krathwhol, 2001) and in Perkins’ “understanding performances” (Perkins,
1995; Perkins & Unger, 1999). While it is no doubt true that being able to do increasingly
difficult things with knowledge requires increasing depth of understanding, this does not
really get at what depth means, and the assessment tasks suffer from the fact that a
student is liable to fail them for reasons other than a lack of understanding (Bereiter &
Scardamalia, 1998).
There is another way of operationalizing depth: define it according to what is
understood rather than how well the student can demonstrate understanding. Student
understanding of evolution can be mapped in this way. At the lowest level, students
understand that biological adaptation occurs but they treat it as something that just
happens. Ohlsson (1991) found this to be a prevalent conception among university
The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
undergraduates. At a significantly deeper level, students have the idea of “survival of the
fittest” and can explain the giraffe’s long neck on the basis of longer necked giraffes
surviving while those with shorter necks died without reproducing. This is about as far as
understanding evolution usually goes in school biology, but as advocates of Intelligent
Design point out, it fails to explain the emergence of new species or the evolution of
complex organs such as the eye. Explaining those things requires understanding several
deeper concepts, and still deeper and more complex ones are required to explain other
phenomena such as irregularities in the time course of evolution. All these
understandings are testable and they form at least a partially ordered scale of depth of
knowledge. Developing similar scales in other domains may require the kind of research
that has been devoted to students’ evolutionary concepts, but it is worth doing not only as
a basis for testing but also as a basis for finer-grained learning objectives.
Defining progressions in depth of understanding is especially challenging for
newer subject matter where there is not a long history of efforts to identify and teach
essential concepts. Probability and statistics are being taught, but are they being taught in
sufficient depth that they become useful tools for gaining insight into real-world
problems? Huck (2009) has identified 52 misconceptions that indicate failures in the
teaching of statistics and probability, but are the conceptual errors as miscellaneous as
they appear, or are there deeper ideas of which the 52 misconceptions are a reflection—
failure, for instance, to grasp and apply the idea of the set of equally likely events, which
is foundational to most school-level work with probability? People’s erroneous thinking
about probability in real-world phenomena, however, seems to depend not so much on
faulty knowledge of statistics and probability as on simplifying heuristics and biases that
preempt formal knowledge (Kahneman, 2003). Another domain that cries out for a
mapping of concepts according to depth is systems theory. First graders are being
introduced to the concept of system and are being schooled in a reasonable definition of
it. But where does instruction go from there? How many students, or teachers for that
matter, can distinguish a systemic explanation from a mere multivariate explanation?
Where does understanding of ecosystems fall short or go wrong?
Quantity of knowledge. Despite its being frequently disparaged in the education
literature, sheer quantity of knowledge still matters. It matters because it increases the
The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education
What Will It Mean To Be An Educated Person in Mid-21st Century?
Carl Bereiter & Marlene Scardamalia
likelihood of making fruitful connections and analogies; it increases one’s resources for
performing successful Web searches; and it provides entry to informative texts that can
convey deeper information (Hirsch, 1987). We have heard informally about an
experimental test tried out by the College Entrance Examination Board sometime before
1970. It tested miscellaneous world knowledge of the kind represented in mass-media
news magazines, and found that scores on such a test were as good or better at predicting
college grades than the familiar aptitude tests. The experiment was abandoned,
reportedly, because it conveyed such a negative impression of the nature of college
education. In reality, of course, schools and colleges do not teach or test miscellaneous
knowledge. It is picked up informally b…
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