The whole time I’ve been writing this blog I’ve been developing a university level class on the philosophy of companion animals called Animals in our Lives. It is not an animal rights class, it is a class on the philosophy and science of human relationships with animals. I have a great bunch of students, and the class has been going very well. So well in fact, that I want to blog about some of the things we’ve discussed.

I haven’t written about my classroom before and I want to be careful to treat my students fairly and with respect.  How does a person write ethically, responsibly, about what gets said in a classroom?

I have two concerns and, sadly (or at least complicatedly), they pull in different directions.

• First, the classroom is not a public space, and I need to protect my students’ privacy. I won’t name them on my blog.
• Second, one of the most important aspects of academic integrity is to give credit to people for their ideas.

This gets complicated because often, perhaps even most of the time, ideas develop during discussions and so they are not really any individual person’s idea. And, in the cases where an idea is an individual person’s, it is very easy to forget and sometimes hard to notice, who the original author of the idea was.

It took a little longer than I would have liked for me to realize that the first step for treating my students with respect was to explain my worries and ask them what they thought was the right thing to do.

Together, we came up with a set of guidelines:

We decided that for the purposes of blogging about this class:

• In general, the ideas that arise in class discussion are authored by the group. Therefore, when I blog about an idea that we discussed in class, I will say that the idea arose in class and I will bring the blog post to the students’ attention, so they can see what I wrote.
• If they feel that the idea I wrote actually arose from an individual student, they just have to let me know, and I’ll edit or remove the post. A student can let me know themselves, or they can speak up for another student, or they can leave an anonymous note in my mailbox in the philosophy department.

I think this should satisfy my concerns about protecting students and giving them credit for their work.

If you have any other suggestions, please tell me. I care about being a good teacher of people as well as a good teacher of dogs.