GoodWork Paper 59: Implementing GoodWork Programs: Helping Students to Become Ethical Workers (PDF)

Author(s): Wendy Fischman, Howard Gardner

Editor(s): Howard Gardner, Series Editor

Media: PDF

Description: Since 1996, the GoodWork® Project has explored the meaning of work in people‘s lives—the kinds of work people want to carry out, the values they bring to their work, and the strategies they use to confront difficult ethical dilemmas. We have interviewed more than 1200 individuals at various ages (young children, adolescents, and adults) involved in nine different work domains: journalism, science, theater, business, higher education, precollegiate education, philanthropy, law, and medicine. In our research, we took particular note of the changing nature of the professional landscape surrounding individual workers in the United States—rapid technological advances, ever more powerful market forces, and epochal current events (including September 11, 2001, the Iraq war, presidential campaigns, a near impeachment), as well as the collapse of several prominent companies (such as Enron and Arthur Anderson). Concerned with how young individuals would navigate these challenges, we asked them about their goals, values, perspectives on work, and strategies for handing workplace dilemmas. We listened carefully to their reports about how difficult it is to carry out work that we call “good work” that is excellent (high technical quality); ethical (responsible, considers its impact on society), and engaging (meaningful to the individual worker). Because of what we heard, over and over again, we become motivated to go beyond research on “good work,” and to make efforts actively to encourage it. Using our own research tools (interview questions and other prompts) and participants‘ accounts, we created a set of materials and approaches to use with individuals and groups in educational settings. Over the last five years, we have worked with teachers and school communities in both precollegiate and collegiate settings. We have designed courses, student retreats, professional development workshops, and orientation programs. In what follows, we detail these interventions. We hope that that they will be widely shared and adapted strategically by colleagues in education and other spheres.