Exercising ethical intellect

A redeveloped RVE curriculum, which delves deeper into ethics and real-world issues, spawned the idea, last year, for students to be given the chance to participate in an ‘Ethics Olympiad’ for the first time. Expressions of interests were invited from students in Years 8 and 10, which eventually led to two Year 10 teams and one Year 8 team becoming involved in the pandemic-induced online event. The Olympiad demands the same intellectual rigour as a debate but does not take the same format. Students work as a team to apply ethical theories to real-life case studies and respond to questions while building and critiquing their own and others’ arguments. St Margaret’s teams discussed such topics as ‘do we have a responsibility to know how a charity spends our donated money’; ‘at what point in a relationship do you disclose you’ve been in gaol’; ‘does the government have a responsibility to compensate you if you are affected by climate change (for example, if your house ends up underwater)’. Louise Brown, Head of the Sociocultural Studies Faculty, said the activity gave students the chance to draw on various aspects of their learning across a range of subject areas and apply those learnings to new situations.

‘This process is an excellent example of deep learning and knowledge transference, which is a key learning goal of our academic framework.

‘It also gives students the chance to engage in and understand civil discourse, and the importance of showing respect to the other team members and alternative views.’

The Year 10 St Margaret’s blue team won the Silver Medal for the Queensland heats and went on to compete in the international event.

We asked the students to comment on their experience: ‘It wasn’t adversarial. It was good training not to have to take the opposite perspective, but to have an honest discussion about the issues.’

‘I liked the approach of the judges. Their way of thinking was deep, and their questions made me really use my brain!’ ‘It was great to have a different lens [through which] to think about issues. Now whenever I hear something [ethics based] on the radio I can often relate it to what we learnt and engage with it in a deeper way.’ ‘I loved learning about the ethical theories – Deontology and Consequentialism. The training session we had before the competition was really helpful – there were all these theories we’d not come across before and we were then able to use them in our own presentation.’ The resounding consensus of students was to continue to compete this year.