Abstract
An activity called Purple Dragons and Yellow Toadstools, originally reported in 1987 as a training activity for jurors, was adapted as a priming exercise for a unit on teaching research ethics with undergraduate students. In this activity, learners develop skills for building negotiated consensus. The procedure involves individuals’ ranking 10–15 moral transgressions and/or legal violations followed by a small group discussion in order to arrive at an agreed-upon ranking by the team. The framework has proved to be quite flexible, adaptable to different subject areas and with different populations of students.
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Notes
Unfortunately, the origins of Purple Dragons and Yellow Toadstools, beyond “I think we used it in a workshop”, are currently lost to time. The only citation to it is from Cordner and Brooks (1987) with a footnote that references an adaptation to the activity used by Smith (1974). In the 1987 report, the activity is used as a training exercise for jurors. While preparing this manuscript, both Cordner and Brooks were contacted, and neither could recall or find any more detail than what was reported in their article (the reference to Smith is a photocopy of a handout).
A useful warm-up activity we developed for Purple Dragons and Yellow Toadstools is called “Legal versus Moral.” A 2 × 2 grid is presented to students (x-axis labels: “legal” and “illegal;” y-axis labels: “moral” and “immoral”) with the instruction to think about whether all four cells are occupied. 3–5 min of individual contemplation is followed by a period of the instructor gathering participants’ ideas and prompting, as needed (e.g., where would you place humans killing other humans?”).
Preliminary data from 392 students in the three different settings is available upon request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank their students for continually engaging one another with enthusiasm and thoughtful discussion. BPC thanks the undergraduate group leaders who help implement these activities in their supplemental instruction sessions (L. Chen, L. Daboul, T. Friedlander, J. Gatti, J. Lawniczak, D. Luan, J. Luo, K. McKernan, A. Milen, A. Min, C. Nino, A. Nishii, P. Parker, M. Payne, M. Ryan, R. Tarnopol, A. Young). We dedicate this paper to the legacy of the unknown individual(s) who originally created Purple Dragons and Yellow Toadstools.
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Coppola, B.P., Plough, I.C. & Sun, H. Purple Dragons and Yellow Toadstools a Versatile Exercise for Introducing Students to Negotiated Consensus. Sci Eng Ethics 25, 1261–1269 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00088-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00088-1