“SoTL is the process of exploring, researching, developing, refining, reflecting upon, and communicating better ways and means of producing, promoting, and enhancing scholarly learning and teaching in ways that are ethically [emphasis added] reasoned and inclusive.” — Healey, Bass, Caulfield, Hoffman, McGinn, Miller-Young, & Haigh, “Being Ethically Minded: Practising the Scholarship of Teaching in an Ethical Manner” (2013, p. 24).
Ethics & Research
In “Being Ethically Minded: Practising the Scholarship of Teaching in an Ethical Manner” (2013), Healey and colleagues define ethics as “a combination of codes for determining what one ought to do and why one ought to do that,” providing “the tools needed to develop practical compromises between what is correct universally and what is right in particular situations” (p. 24-25). Ethical principles are in place to ensure that anyone associated with a research project is protected from any potential harm.
The 2014 Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS 2) on “Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans” is Canada’s primary policy about ethical standards for human subject research. The policy statement was created for the Tri-Council’s three major agencies (SSHRC, CIHR, and NSERC) to ensure that all human subject research is conducted in an ethical manner. Researchers must comply with the policy in order to receive funding from any one of the agencies or if they are affiliated with a university that receives funding from any of these agencies.
- TEXT BOX: The TCPS2 defines research as “an undertaking intended to extend knowledge through a disciplined inquiry or systematic investigation” (p. 209).
Development of Ethics Reviews
Over the course of the 20th century, researchers became increasingly aware of the harm that can be inflicted on human subjects in the course of scientific inquiry. Atrocities against humanity had been well documented, such as the Nazi human experimentation during WWII and the Tuskegee Experiment, as well as the harmful social or psychological experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiments and the Milgram Experiment. The aftermath of these studies raised the moral consciousness of the general public to demand higher standards for the protection of harm from the research community. Out of these events came The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research from the U.S.’s National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1979), which led to stronger policies for research on humans in research institutions worldwide, as well as committees that monitor these policies. (As suggested in this history, rules about what is appropriate in studying humans are ever-changing, and thus projects that might have been permissible decades ago might not be acceptable today.)
In Canada, Research Ethics Boards (REBs) operate on the principle that researchers, generally, cannot and should not harm or deceive human subjects in the name of advancing human knowledge. If there is a potential for harm, participants must know the risks before agreeing to participate in the research. If deception is necessary for the research, the potential benefits must outweigh the risks.
Nancy L. Chick 