Student Perspectives on a World They'll Inherit

To date, Community Voices in Medical Ethics has done its most significant work through the Community Ethics Committee. The CEC has studied a number of difficult ethical questions, many of them related to decisions concerning care at the end of life, and given recommendations to the Harvard teaching hospitals through its ethics leadership.

These reports are meant to bring a community voice into the institutional dialogue at the hospitals. You can read these reports on this site under Publications of CEC.

A second aspect of the Community Voices work is in public engagement, and an example of that can be viewed under Transplant Ethics Outreach.

Transplant Ethics Outreach consists of two visual art pieces and a video produced by high school students of Julian Willard, a founding member of the CEC and a member of the Community Voices board. Julian teaches English and founded the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at The Rivers School, a small college preparatory day school in Weston, Massachusetts.

Julian has a bachelor’s degree from Oxford University and a Ph.D in philosophy from King's College London. More recently, he pursued his interests in the bioethics and interdisciplinary education as a Yale-Hastings Scholar in Bioethics (2013-14) and as a Future of Learning Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (2014). 

The student videos reflect Julian’s interest in community outreach efforts that promote reflection and discussion of ethical issues associated with contemporary medicine. The outreach materials presented here are part of the student work for an ethics course at Rivers in which students are called upon to integrate the disciplines of biology, literature, and philosophy in order to respond effectively to key ethical questions.

So please have a look at these student perspectives on challenging issues in medical ethics. 

Julian’s passion for bioethics education is also on display in his research paper for Taylor & Francis Online, which proposes an interdisciplinary approach based on the CEC’s report on medical futility. Read Julian’s paper here and the CEC’s report here.

“For public engagement to be truly public we need to include young people as well as elders and everyone in between,” says Community Voices and CEC co-founder Carol Powers, “In fact, one could argue that those young people have the most at stake since they will be caregivers and policy makers and patients whose rights and responsibilities, values and health care will be shaped by decisions made today.”