National High School Ethics Bowl, 2022. Photo: Alex Berenfeld.
I believe that philosophy finds its fullest expression in our public lives.
Done well, I think philosophy can engage all in meaningful inquiry about their values, beliefs, and about their personal, social, and political lives more generally. Given this picture, I am committed to forging meaningful relationships between the academy and the surrounding community and society. I believe this involves taking seriously community members’ natural curiosity and ability to think carefully about fundamental ideas, and I strive to make opportunities to think philosophically as widely available as possible.
The Prindle Institute for Ethics
I am currently Associate Director for Content Strategy and Engagement at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, where I also teach. At the Institute, I oversee the development of a large and diverse library of ethics education resources across various media, including The Prindle Post, the popular Teaching Children Philosophy materials library, and the Examining Ethics podcast. I also lead the Institute’s various national public engagement initiatives.
To learn more about the Prindle Institute and its programs, please visit prindleinstitute.org.
The National High School Ethics Bowl
Dialogue over debate. Reasoning over rhetoric.
From 2019-2024, I served as Director of the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB), based at UNC’s Parr Center for Ethics. The NHSEB is an award-winning outreach program geared toward moral and civic education for thousands of high school students across the country. It is designed to get students, thinking, talking, and ultimately working together to understand and respond to the most complex moral and political issues of our time. The Ethics Bowl format is based around the idea of a conversation, a give-and-take exchange between equals. In an Ethics Bowl match, teams take turns analyzing cases about complex ethical dilemmas and responding to questions and comments from the other team and from a panel of judges. An Ethics Bowl importantly differs from a debate competition in that students are not assigned opposing views; rather, they defend whichever position they think is correct, provide each other with constructive criticism, and win by demonstrating that they have thought rigorously and systematically about the cases and engaged respectfully and supportively with all participants. NHSEB’s goal is to do more than teach students how to think through ethical issues: It is to teach students how to think through ethical issues together, as fellow citizens in a complex moral and political community.
Participant Testimonials
“I value the opportunity to have thoughtful discussions with other students without feeling pressure to uphold my position to the bitter end. I like that it is important to acknowledge the faults in my team’s argument instead of ignoring everything that doesn’t directly support our position.”
“I have become more confident within the classroom. I have begun participating more often in class discussions and I am not afraid of my ideas being shot down by my opposition. Instead, I appreciate criticism because it has the ability to make my opinions and ideas stronger.”
“There has never been an experience or a greater tool that has made me believe not only that I can be a better person, but that I can challenge the world to be better, and that there is that possibility… There’s so many things that get lost in the politics and the negative side of the world, but [Ethics Bowl] gives you a genuine platform to challenge the world to be better, and I think that’s really special.”
Other Public Philosophy Projects
UNC’s Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl team prepares for a presentation at the IEB Southeastern Regional in November 2019.
APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (IEB)
2019-Present
In addition to my work with the National High School Ethics Bowl, I have been involved with the APPE Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl upon which it is based for many years. I am a frequent volunteer judge at APPE IEB’s Regional and National Competitions, and was honored to work with multiple Ethics Bowl teams during my time at UNC-Chapel Hill. As an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, I sit on the APPE IEB Steering Committee, as well as on APPE IEB’s National Championship Organizing Committee.
Students discuss a case at the 2022 National High School Ethics Bowl Championship. Photo: Alex Berenfeld
Assessing Virtue Development Among High School Students
2022-present
In recent years, I have worked with an interdisciplinary team of researchers including Michael Prinzing (Yale, Philosophy/Psychology) and Michael Vazquez (UNC-CH, Philosophy) to develop an ongoing empirical research program to assess the National High School Ethics Bowl and other related public philosophy programs. More specifically, we are interested in whether participation in these programs measurably helps students develop key intellectual and interpersonal traits. After developing initial metrics in late 2022, our teams’s first national impact study on NHSEB was conducted in the 2022-2023 academic year. Additional study development and expansion to other parts of the Ethics Bowl activity is currently underway as of 2024.
Participants discuss the purpose of education in a discussion group at the Bartlett Reserve Retirement Community in Durham, NC. Photo: Tessa Smith
Philosophy Outreach in North Carolina and Beyond
2019-2024
At UNC-Chapel Hill, I was involved in numerous award-winning initiatives offered by the Philosophy Outreach Program, jointly administered by the Department of Philosophy and the Parr Center for Ethics. My work with this program involved developing curricular resources on concepts in ethics and civics for K-12 educators, working with partners at UNC and beyond to incorporate Ethics Bowl-style learning into various professional development programs, leading ethics and politics discussion groups at multiple local retirement communities, participating in UNC’s Philosophy by Mail program with inmates at North Carolina correctional institutions, and more.
Susan J. Brison (Dartmouth) delivers the Keynote Address at the 2019 PGSA @ UT Philosophy Conference, “The Moral and Political Challenges of Speech.”
PSGA @ UT Philosophy Conference
2017-2019
In the 2017-2018 academic year, I co-founded and organized (with Tylor Cunningham and Jeffrey Pannekoek) the now-annual PGSA @ UT Philosophy Conference at the University of Tennessee. Our inaugural conference, “Justice Across Borders," focused on migration, immigration, and international justice. In 2018-2019, I organized our second conference, "The Moral and Political Challenges of Speech." Each conference brought together twelve graduate and early-career scholars from across the world, engaging and incisive keynote speakers, and UT students and community members for a two-day conversation on complex issues of public interest.
GES 5th graders discuss environmental values in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree at Walker County Schools’ STEAM Day in May 2014.
Environmental Ethics Outreach at Gilbert Elementary
2013-2015
In the summer of 2013, I worked with Savannah Oliver of the University of Mississippi to design a (co-)curricular program focusing on moral and environmental education for primary school students. Over the course of the 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 academic years, I consulted on the implementation of this program, integrating it with pre-existing STEM curriculum in my hometown's school district to ensure that students could learn about important moral issues on familiar terms. As a result of this collaboration, a pilot program in partnership with Gilbert Elementary School encouraged students to engage each other in critical conversations, as well as learning about and grappling with tough moral and environmental issues in some of their favorite children’s books and films.
Public-Facing Writing
ARTICLE (2024)
Building Bridges for Dialogue: A Multi-Faceted Approach to Deliberative Moral and Civic Education for All
Forthcoming, with Delaney Thull
We outline a vision for NHSEBBridge—a novel strategy for moral and civic education for implementation with students in grades 9-12. NHSEBBridge operates as an extension of the award-winning National High School Ethics Bowl program. In this paper, we focus on the challenges involved with extending such programming to students from underserved schools and communities who are often left out. In our own work, this has focused on schools in the rural American South. We find that the unique challenges faced by schools we work with create similarly unique opportunities for a deliberative brand of educational programming to thrive. Ultimately, we propose NHSEBBridge as a model for educators at the collegiate and high school levels to expand access to philosophy programs which focus on building students’ deliberative skills.
OP-ED (2022)
High School Ethics Bowl Students’ Lessons for All
In EducationNC, with Michael Vazquez
In this brief op-ed, we worry, apropos of a scorched-earth election season, that Americans have forgotten how to talk to each other. To learn and relearn these skills, particularly in contexts of disagreement, we suggest looking to High School Ethics Bowl students around the country for efficient modeling of precisely the kinds of deliberative behaviors that are missing from the nation’s politics in recent months and years.
BOOK CHAPTER (2022)
Meeting the Challenge: The Future of Ethics Bowl
In Roberta Israeloff and Karen Mizell (eds.), The Ethics Bowl Way: Answering Questions, Questioning Answers, and Creating Ethical Communities. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.
The Ethics Bowl discussion format and Ethics Bowl programs across the United States (and increasingly, across the world) present and model a better way to argue for the tens of thousands of participants they serve. In so doing, the activity inculcates individual habits of mind and norms of cooperation and deliberation which are crucial to a healthily functioning democracy (Ladenson 2001, 2012; Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Dworkin 2006). In the wake of recent social and political upheaval, I argue that these habits of mind are more crucial than ever, and warrant an expansion of the Ethics Bowl’s reach and impact. This chapter proposes important new tools and approaches in pursuit of such expansion, of equal comprehensive access for participants, and for adaptation of the format for new audiences and use cases.
