Growing up morally: An experiential classroom unit on moral development

Abstract

One reason why many of today’s business leaders are frequently viewed as unethical, corrupt, and corruptible is that values transmitted (implicitly) by university business education courses influence students to ignore ethics. This paper argues that to help future business leaders become more ethical, business school implicit values should reflect a more ethical direction. The present paper describes an experiential pedagogy designed to help students develop morally. It does so by asking students to: 1) participate in exercises sensitizing them to ethical issues, 2) reflect on their own ethical values and decisions they’ve made in the past that either mirror or contradict those values, 3) read about and understand moral development models, and 4) self-assess in terms of stages of their own moral development, as portrayed in the models. Qualitative and quantitative results are summarized for five separate uses of the complete pedagogy in undergraduate Social Responsibility courses at a large Midwestern university in the United States, as well as for portions of the pedagogy used in nine other classes over a 14- year period.