Teaching Ethics and Accreditation: Faculty Competence, Methods and Assessment

Kathy Lund Dean; Jeri Mullins Beggs; Charles J. Fornaciari

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Teaching Ethics and Accreditation: Faculty Competence, Methods and Assessment

Kathy Lund Dean

Idaho State University, USA

Jeri Mullins Beggs

Illinois State University, USA

Charles J. Fornaciari

Florida Gulf Coast University, USA

Volume 4: 2007, pp. 5-26: ABSTRACT

New standards adopted by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB) stress business curriculum-wide learning objectives, of which ethics is a critical part. “Knowledge and skills” in ethical responsibilities are required as part of institutional accreditation. An exploratory study offers insight into ethics integration, perceived comfort in teaching ethics, and methods used. The main tension presented balances calls for ethics across business curricula with the assertion that ethics instruction, in the hands of an untrained professor, may do more damage than good. Results suggest that while faculty include ethics in their courses, only slightly more than half have received some kind of ethics training. We also explore ethics pedagogies and found differences between methods respondents used in the classroom and desired learning methods for themselves. We offer insights about and possible explanations for the gaps we found in our study, contextualizing them in new literature. We finish with a brief discussion of how our findings impact accreditation assessment.