Sure, I first I should explain what the
community action project is.
It is a nation-wide program in which
introductory anthropology students are given
the facts of the matter in an ethical debate that
is current in anthropological practice.
So, for example, this year the debate had to do
with the ethical use of blood samples that
were drawn 20 years ago on an indigenous
population and are being repurposed now
without permission for the original donors.
Students read about a one hundred page booklet
which lays out the history and the competing
arguments for ethical use of those materials.
They must then write a letter of their own to
one of the decision makers in the controversy
arguing a position, arguing a point of view,
a course of action.
Those letters are submitted to the national
pool and each student who participates then
receives four blind copies from the peer pool
and through an electronic winnowing process
they evaluate these until the highest scoring
five letters nationally are selected.
Those five letters then are posted so that students
who did not take one of the first five spots can
affix their electronic signatures and then those
letters are actually sent to the decision makers.
For example, this fall there were
approximately 2,000 students across the
country who were participating and the
decision makers could see that 500 aspiring
anthropology students favored a particular
course of action as resolution to the
ethical dilemma.
Why do I like this?
I like this for so many reasons.
The very first topic that we address in my
teaching of the course is ethics and so they
become aware that there is a code of ethics,
what the general outlines of such a code are,
and as the quarter progresses, I point out ethical
dilemmas in research situations and
encounters with the ethnographic other.
What I like about this project is it makes them
take a stand.
They have to logic out for themselves what they
think the proper course of action would be.
They have to argue it logically.
They are subjected to the evaluation of their
peers, I don’t have to grade anything in this
large project, I take the evaluation of their
peers as the grade for the project.
It reinforces for them the centrality of ethical
decision making in not just anthropology but
in any other professions and the methods by
which ethical reasoning is done.
They enjoy it because it is sent to real people
making real decisions in this world, so it isn’t
just an exercise seen only by the TA and the
professor that I hand back and they file in the
drawer.
Students report a high level of satisfaction
with this program even though it’s extra work
and even though there is a modest but
nonetheless there is a fee to participate and the
pride at being successful in this endeavor was
just very clear.
We did have a national winner this fall.
Last spring we had two national winners out
of Western Washington University, so I’ve
been very proud of them, as well, but you
didn’t have to be a national winner to be proud
of your result.
Students who were probably earning a C, a B-
in the class had their letters judged to be
sometimes in the 95% range and they report to
me that having had that one solid success did
more for their own view of themselves as
being developing scholars than any other
activity.