If you walk into an EthicsLab course, you will not recognize it as an introductory ethics class.

EthicsLab is an initiative of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown, one of the oldest academic ethics institutes in the world. EthicsLab's team-based approach brings together designers, ethics experts, students, and external partners to make progress on some of the most complex moral problems of our time. In EthicsLab classes, students are encouraged to fail publicly, and fail fast. Using a studio learning model, students create tangible objects for juried critique by outside experts several times throughout the semester. Students build knowledge as they develop resilience, inquisitiveness, and collaborative skills.

I never thought a class could change what you believed or how you saw the world; I thought only experience or travelling could do that, but once again, bioethics proves to me that I shouldn’t be too quick to judge.

Victoire Carruso, EthicsLab Student, 2012

Ethics-Centered Studio Learning at Georgetown

Since 2012, EthicsLab has sponsored or hosted a number of classes making use of its flexible space and studio learning model, from Bioethics and the Moral Imagination to The University as a Design Problem to an experimental course collaborative that united three classes in three different disciplines to test one proposal for how EthicsLab's ethics-centered studio learning model might scale at Georgetown.