Educating Responsible Innovators-to-Be: Hands-on Participation with Biotechnology

摘要

This paper contributed a pedagogic stance for RRI education that emphasizes a humanities-informed, hands-on participation with the complexity that defines RRI. We suggested that active and experiential learning that brings students in close contact with the material aspects of the issues at stake and exposes deep differences in stakeholder perspectives can be an engaging way to train the anticipatory and reflective capacities of future responsible innovators. We implemented such a hands-on participatory pedagogy using the tactics of DIY biology and bioart, two practices distinguished by a unique materiality and a potentially challenging moral edge. Our experiences with three subsequent editions of the module 'Ethics, culture and biotechnology', minor Responsible Innovation, are particularly encouraging and motivating. Our observations have also enabled us to separate our original notion of hands-on participation into two potentially promising dimensions, namely the encounter with the material and the encounter with vastly different knowledge systems. It remains to be seen whether hands-on participation can be implemented also according to our original motivation, i.e. as a hands-on engagement with actual moral dilemmas. And it remains to be seen whether the experiences of our students can translate to personal changes as well as to changes in the institutional and professional settings of RRI practice. Still, we hope to have encouraged RRI educators to consider and implement their own versions of hands-on participation with the fundamental aspects and challenges of RRI.