The Department of Philosophy hosts the yearly Saskatchewan High School Ethics Bowl in early March.

1. Form a team
2. Register your team on ethicsbowl.ca
3. Get your complete training package
4. Prepare your team.
5. Compete in early March.

The ethics bowl invites student to discuss timely ethical issues and sharpen their critical thinking skills in a friendly environment. It improves on debate competitions in two ways. First, students decide what they want to argue. They can genuinely speak their mind and look for the best solution to an ethical issue. Second, the faceoff between teams doesn’t take the form of a rebuttal, but that of a probe. The point of this probe is to help the other team refine their initial view. By design, this new competition promotes productive collaborative work on complex issues.

The high school ethics bowl open to all students from Grade 9 to 12. It provides a unique and exciting way for students to develop skills associated with the Saskatchewan K-12 cross-curricular core competencies (in particular: thinking, literacies, identity and interdependence, social responsibility). 

To prepare for competitions, teams receive a set of cases that focus on current affairs. Recent topics include online shopping, gene editing, sexting, drug consumption and responsibility, leisure and labour, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), AI art, Canadian wildfires, duties of bystanders, prison reform, media coverage of crimes, civil disobedience, territorial acknowledgements, voting age, memes and democratic speech, laws surrounding warfare, legal pluralism and Indigenous legal order. Training involves researching cases, working out argumentative strategies, and actively listening to and registering other perspectives. All teams participate in several matches, and leading teams move to the final round. The following skills are evaluated:

• communication
• use of relevant information
• critical thinking
• original thinking
• active listening
• collaboration

• Ethicsbowl Resources
• Ethics Bowl Canada Governing Documents
• Ethics Bowl Rulebook
• The ethics bowl in action: 2019 US High School Ethics Bowl

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