Posted; August 22,2006
Audubon's faculty member, Dr. Donal Day, was invited to speak to a group of students in a bioethics class at St. Joseph's Academy in Baton Rouge. His presentation entitled, "Ethanol from Sugar Cane as a Renewable Fuel" is part of a unit on environmental ethics.
According to SJA's science co-chair Ms. Lori Harper, students will have to conduct further research on their own. A state legislator will then come in to speak to the class on the legislative perspective on ethanol and the environment and issues such as our dependency on foreign oil. The environmental ethics unit culminates in an "Ethanol Bill" that the students have to write based on their own assessment.
This unit is integral to the bioethics course that is offered for the first time ever to juniors and seniors from both St. Joseph's Academy and Catholic High School. The faculty at St. Joseph's developed a basic outline of this course with the help of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
"Dr. Laura Bishop is an ethicist there with whom we have worked since 1998 on ethics units which we have incorporated into our existing science courses. But now we are offering a stand alone course and we are very excited!" added Harper. An article published on SJA's Web site in 2003 describes how this program began.