Teaching Tech Ethics

Experiential Ethics at MIT

Experiential Ethics is a collaborative, discussion-based summer course where students gain theoretical and practical tools while reflecting critically on their personal, professional, and political roles. The class can be taken by itself or alongside summer internships. Experiential Ethics has no lecture component: all classes happen in weekly virtual discussion groups. Students complete a project about the ethical dimensions of their summer experiences that they present in a poster showcase each fall.

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I was involved with the program from 2021-2023, first as a Teaching Fellow (primary instructor for a small discussion group), and then as Assistant and later Co-Director. In those roles, I have been responsible for logistics, organizing, and outreach for the course; selecting and training cohorts of interdisciplinary teaching fellows in philosophical pedagogy; leading weekly meetings with the teaching team; and revising the syllabus and lesson plans.

In 2023, Sonia Maria Pavel and I developed an expanded syllabus that embedded more social and political philosophy, including units on structural injustice and role responsibility. At the end of the revised course, 100% of students reported an increased ability to identify and critically evaluate ethical dimensions of real-world situations, interpret ethical arguments, and advocate for real-world ethical decisions in their communities. You can see our 2023 syllabus here and our evaluation report here.