Learning Ethics on a Pedagogical Playground

Abstract

Ethics educators of a stodgier ilk may be inclined, in reading The Brewsters, to check their enjoyment with the assessment that they’re (guiltily) engaged in a kind of intellectual recess. How can one feel at play in gaining an exposure to the rudiments of interprofessional ethics? Should one? On the other hand, the delight may trigger the recollection that important lessons— even certain ethical lessons—are learned, pleasurably, on the various playgrounds of our lives. Authored by Jeffrey Spike, Tom Cole, and Richard Buday, The Brewsters represents, foremost, a pedagogical accomplishment grounded in a dazzling display of muted rhetorical sophistication. It is a narrative fiction fashioned after the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Readers are invited to identify with a character, then, inhabiting the narrative, confront various ethical dilemmas that call for a decision. Each decision, in turn, takes the reader to a different place in the narrative progression. The nature of the engagement, then, is the rather existential creation of the plot of life through a series of ethical choices and through some confrontation with the consequences of the choices—all in the safe world of fiction where the costs of those choices remain, thankfully, imagined and instructively so. The family of the Brewsters is humorously, sometimes endearingly, dysfunctional. The father, Wayne, is a hypochondriac and is given to alcoholism; his wife, Sheila, is having an affair with her boss and is trying to get daughter, Stephanie, (not sexually active) on birth control without the 16 year-old’s knowing about it; son Walter, just beginning medical school, gets drunk and crashes his car; grandmother Gloria—the most normal of the lot—is J Med Humanit (2015) 36:85–88 DOI 10.1007/s10912-012-9190-8