Pioneer High School students will represent Michigan this month at the National High School Ethics Bowl. But what’s an ethics bowl?
Jeanine DeLay says you can think of it as the inverse of a traditional debate club. Instead of winning arguments, students try to come up with the most ethical solution to various case studies, and interaction among competitors and judges is encouraged. “It’s a conversation and a discussion, rather than a pro-con view that the competitors are taking,” she says.
After three decades teaching ethics at Greenhills School and the U-M School of Kinesiology, DeLay founded the nonprofit A2 Ethics to “interject ethical discussions into everyday life.” Last year, her group partnered with the U-M Department of Philosophy outreach program to found the Michigan ethics bowl competition.
Six teams took part in this year’s regional competition in February. It ended in a showdown between two from Pioneer, “The Communist Partay” and “The Pioneer Purple Gang.” After winning a case study that looked at newscasters’ decisions about reporting Robin Williams’ suicide, the Partay faces twenty-two teams from across the U.S. and Canada at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on April 10-11.
