Abstract:
The area of biotechnology in the new curriculum for Technology Education raises many issues of an ethical nature. Bioethics can be broadly defined as the study of decision making that is associated with the use of living organisms. With the advent of recombinant-DNA-technology, biotechnology has expanded rapidly in the last ten years and this has led to heated debate about the acceptability of certain kinds of research and the applications of that research. The major ethical issues in biotechnology are centered around ecology, animal reproduction, and the genetic engineering of plants and animals, human health and social biology and the responsibilities of humans for other species on the planet. While there is a large and growing body of literature on these issues, it has rarely been applied to the field of technology education. This paper surveys some of the literature on values and ethics and how they relate to the new technology curriculum. The paper also examines the proposition that teachers may be avoiding ethical issues in their teaching programs because of lack of knowledge, skills or confidence in how to conduct such lessons. Since one of the stated aims of the new curriculum is to develop technologically literate citizens, who are able to make informed judgements and decisions about new biological developments, any research which examines and informs about current practice in this field can only improve the future delivery of the new technology curriculum.