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Research with Human Subjects as a Paradigm in Teaching
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2021
Extract
As a university administrator, I worry about the form and substance of undergraduate education and about ways to encourage interdisciplinary perspectives on problems in a research university dominated by particular specialized disciplines. I also continue to teach a seminar in Cornell's Biology & Society Program for undergraduates and to assist others in teaching a course called Medical Humanities for second-year medical students. In the course of these administrative and teaching activities, I find myself returning to Jay Katz's Experimentation with Human Beings —both as model for teaching and as a perspective for institutional learning and change —as a model for professional action.
Jay Katz's approach to research with human subjects provides an excellent framework for analyzing the nature of teaching not simply in professional or continuing education programs in law, medicine, or social work, but in undergraduate programs as well. In my view, changing the ways in which universities help students to learn at all levels can be analyzed through the process of reflection, action, and evaluation developed in Katz's seminal work on human experimentation and most recently expounded in his suggested reforms of professional medical education in The Silent World of Doctor and Patient. For Jay Katz, the scholar who guided me to the realization that teaching and administering within the university at all levels is essentially a problem in human research, I offer this tribute.
- Type
- Autonomy and Risk Taking
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- Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1988
References
Katz, Jay, Experimentation with Human Beings: The Authority of the Investigator, Subject, Professions, and the State in the Human Experimentation Process (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972); I wrote a commentary on this book. see Palmer, , “The High Priests Questioned or at Least Cross-Examined, A Comment on Jay Kan's Experimentation With Human Beings: The Authority of the Investigator, Subject, Professions, and the State in the Human Experimentation Process,” Rutgers Camden Law Journal, 5 (1974): 237.Google Scholar
It may be strange to think about institutions as having the capacity to learn, particularly from institutional experiments. I rely heavily on the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön for the notion of organizational learning. See Argyris, Chris and Schön, Donald, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1978); Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983); see also Cornell University, Proceedings of the Conference on: Professionalism, Vocationalism & Liberal Education (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, 1988).Google Scholar
Whether there is a crisis in higher education might be debated, but it is apparent that the media and the general public are tremendously attracted to the pronouncements of the critics of higher education such as Secretary Bennett and Allan Bloom. Most recently, Bennett attacked Stanford University for changing its Western culture course to include works by “women, minorities and persons of color.” Bennett, quoted in James Atlas, “The Battle of the Books” New York Times, June 5, 1988, sec. 6; Schön illustrates a different aspect of the crisis as he points to a loss of confidence in the professions since the mid- 1970's. See Schön, supra note 2, at 39.Google Scholar
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