Giant Tree in Pack Forrest Woods
Today we started out by looking at a ton of resources that are useful for both Bioethics and general Biology topics. The list is posted below:
Northwest Association for Biomedical Research
Bioethics.net
Ethics Updates (University of San Diego)
Genetic Science Learning Center
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu
High School Bioethics Curriculum Project
http://highschoolbioethics.georgetown.edu
Genome Sciences- University of Washington
http://gsoutreach.gs.washington.edu
National center for Case Study Teaching in Science
http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/
National Institute of Health- Exploring Bioethics
http://science.education.nih.gov/customers.nsf/HSBioethics.htm
Your Genes, Your Choices: Exploring the Issues Raised by Genetic Research
http://ehrweb.aaas.org/her/books/index.html
These topics were really awesome and you can request free resources from a lot of these resources. I took a look at the National Institute of Health, which are very high quality, and ordered a lot of the free materials. It is crucial to order these materials soon- as there is uncertainty due to budget constraints. It appears that there is no funding going to the National Institute of Health in regards to educational outreach, basically getting rid of the office and all materials.
Next, we went through the basic curriculum of Bioethics 101 by NWABR. We started by reviewing how many of the lead teachers integrate Bioethics into their current classes. This was interesting, and I’m hoping to have a bioethical part of most of the units that I already cover. Furthermore, when we cover Matt Killeen, our 9th grade World History teacher covers the Holocaust, I have some great resources on Ethics that came from the Nuremberg code as well as multiple articles that deal with morality. I am very much interested in this collaboration to better teach our students.
We then reviewed the homework that we had to complete prior to the program. I ended up reviewing most of the materials on the flight out here to Seattle. Just the materials that we completed gave even greater understanding to the homework assignment, and I feel like I understand how to teach Ethics at a deeper level.
After lunch, we completed a case study called “Dennis’s Decision.” This describes an ethical dilemma of treatment of a medical condition with a patient refusing treatment. This was a very engaging case study, and the NWABR curriculum guides the process very thoroughly. There’s just something extra when you have curriculum designed by teachers and created for teachers- everything just clicks better than from a textbook.
Finally, we ended the experience today by looking at the question “How much does the volume of a gummy bear increase after soaking in water?” My group decided to check the gummy bears volume by water displacement. We’ll look at our results tomorrow.
Gummy Bear Experiment
Soon, it will be dinner time, and tonight at 7 pm we will be watching the movie “Rare.”