Every Session Marks a Value Shaped: Ethics workshops for 2,000 first-year students

Dr Haemala Thanasegaran, 2026

Purpose

Today's students live at a time of global disinformation and unrestrained corporate greed, where corporations and media vie for the most important commodity – their attention, which invariably shapes their values over time. Dr Haemala Thanasegaran set out to equip Monash Business School students with tools to develop their own ethical values through ethical reasoning and decision-making, by exposing students to ethics in a concrete, practical and engaging way; as early as possible in their tertiary journey, preferably in first year while they're still idealistic; and in core units, to capture as many students as possible so they carry this skill and knowledge throughout university and beyond.

Practice

Haemala designed and conducted the Ethics Workshops – with the aim of helping students progress through Kohlberg's three stages of moral development – for the first time in Semester 1 2026, over three two-hour sessions in Weeks 3, 6 and 9. They were held in lecture theatres across Clayton and Caulfield campuses as part of two first-year core units with large enrolments of about 2,000 students, namely Business and Commercial Law, delivered in person and parallel to the usual asynchronous lectures and face-to-face tutorials. As an experimental initiative, attendance was voluntary, there was no assessment and no pre-reading was required; students were asked to attend with just their mobile phones, pen and paper and an open mind. The content and activities were designed in a holistic and interdisciplinary way, with interactive case studies on current issues, informative and inspiring video clips, role-playing, group discussions and reflective writing, done in a relaxed, non-judgmental setting to encourage free and open engagement.

Output

Attendance was positive even though voluntary, and feedback from students was that they found the workshops informative, inspiring, useful and engaging. A faculty peer reviewer also gave the workshops a fantastic rating and believed they would benefit all first-year students from all disciplines.

Outcome

The workshops' long-term impact on students' ethical development, as implied from anonymous surveys, showed students found them overwhelmingly helpful in reconsidering their personal values, appreciating the wider implications of their decisions, and feeling better prepared for the workplace.

Impact

As a business school with a global presence, with thousands of business students walking through its doors each semester, Monash Business School's long-term impact of nurturing a responsible future generation of leaders would be immense on the business and public sector, the environment, the community and world at large, in tackling the pressing global issues facing humanity.