Degree Date
1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Department
Education
First Advisor
Acacia Nikoi
Second Advisor
Frederick Dressen
Third Advisor
Jeanne Lojovich
Abstract
Physical therapy educators must prepare students to navigate the ethical complexity and pressures of clinical practice. However, limited evidence exists regarding the best pedagogical strategies to develop future clinicians' ethical skills. This study aimed to explore how physical therapy ethics educators integrated their personal and professional experiences with academic elements when designing and implementing ethics instruction. The research draws from the semi-structured interviews of eight educators teaching ethics in Midwestern physical therapy programs to discover instructional patterns supporting student engagement with the content. Participants' narratives specified how curriculum design considerations, critical thinking dispositions, and organizational alignment factors influenced their approach to ethics instruction. Participants' belief that students acquire ethical skills by incorporating professional ethics principles with personal moral development led them to embrace a learner-centered teaching approach, aligning various instructional techniques to facilitate active student engagement. They used a flipped classroom design where lectures and readings were reserved as preparatory work while case discussion was the predominant teaching strategy for class sessions. Cases were designed to reflect ethical challenges students would likely encounter in clinical practice. Participants fostered student sharing and perspective-taking by maintaining consistent small groups, setting course norms, and tailoring discussion formats to students' communication preferences. Participants modeled professional behaviors emulating the affective dispositions from critical thinking needed for empathy in clinical practice. Most programs integrated ethics across the curriculum, often following content on health disparities. Since many respondents acknowledged an incidental link between ethics and health disparities, the study's findings underscore the importance of intentionally including health disparities as a contextual factor of case construction to establish a transparent link between it and the ethics principle of justice. The findings from this research study offered valuable insights for physical therapy educators to prepare their students for the uncertainties and ethical dilemmas encountered in clinical practice.