Fostering students’ ability and willingness for ethical reflection at a business school

Research about reflection in Higher Education is widely available and the fact that reflection contributes to a better and deeper understanding of the learnt content is beyond controversy. Especially in a dynamic and fast-moving world, reflection plays a crucial role, because it helps people to orientate and be aware of what is going on around them. Although there is a lot of research about reflection in general, research about ethical reflection in Higher Education is rare. Ethical reflection is part of reflection which tries to illuminate hidden values, ideas of man and agendas in a particular content and ask critical questions about it. It also challenges the person who reflect to take a stance based on the own values.
Developing concepts and methods, which help to foster this kind of reflection in a study program at a business school, is the aim of this PhD project.
Therefore, the research approach of educational design research is being used. This research approach is very suitable for problems where the solution for a problem has to be developed. After specifying the problem and evaluating literature about the topic a first intervention prototype could be developed. This prototype will be tested and revised again. At the end of this process are design principles, which show how interventions with a similar aim in similar settings should be constructed.
These design principles will be constructed during the whole research process and are the link from practice to theory, because they describe how and why an intervention work and what should be considered by designing another intervention for a similar problem.