When Media Meets Ethics: Designing Assessment That Lives in the Real World
A field note on building a portfolio approach that asks students to develop ethical analysis through cultural engagement—not just case studies
I'm launching a new assessment this term for Ethical Practice and Behaviours with my second year HRM students, and it builds directly on my earlier thinking about media archaeology for people practice. Instead of traditional case studies about ethical dilemmas in sanitised business contexts, students will spend ten weeks developing their analytical capabilities through weekly engagement with media sources alongside academic frameworks.
Here's the structure: each week, students encounter both a media source—this could be a Netflix documentary about gig work, a podcast series on corporate wellness culture, episodes of The Office, news coverage of workplace scandals—and the week's required academic paper on stakeholder theory, ethical decision-making, or strategic approaches to social performance.
They write 200-400-word reflections capturing what ethical considerations struck them, how they're learning to analyse stakeholder conflicts using the frameworks, and what this means for their own developing stance as future HR professionals. Then we gather for peer discussions where they test their analysis against others' perspectives.
By week twelve, they'll have this portfolio of thinking-in-progress, plus a final integrative reflection tracing how their analytical capabilities developed across the module.
Why Media Sources for Ethics?
The challenge with traditional business ethics education is that it treats ethical considerations as abstract problems to be solved through the correct application of frameworks. Students learn to identify stakeholders, map conflicts of interest, propose strategic responses—but often without feeling the human texture of what these conflicts actually mean in lived workplace experience.
Media sources carry that texture. When students watch documentary footage of Amazon warehouse workers, they don't just see "labour stakeholders"—they encounter the embodied reality of what efficiency metrics mean for human dignity. When they analyse workplace comedy, they're not just identifying "cultural tensions"—they're recognising how power operates through humour, how inclusion and exclusion get performed daily.
This isn't about replacing rigorous analysis with emotional response. It's about developing ethical literacy that can read power relations and stakeholder conflicts across different forms of cultural knowledge. Every film, every podcast, every news story carries assumptions about what people are for, what counts as success, and who is disposable. Making these visible becomes part of the analytical work.
The Peer Discussion Experiment
The part that feels most experimental is centering those weekly peer discussions as crucial to developing analytical capabilities. Students will share their reflections in small groups, encountering different ways of seeing stakeholder relationships, different approaches to evaluating strategic responses to ethical challenges.
This is where the learning happens—not just in individual reflection, but in the collision between perspectives. Someone interprets a workplace scandal as evidence of systemic failure; another sees individual bad actors. Someone proposes regulatory solutions; another argues for cultural change. The conversation that emerges becomes practice for the kinds of ethical navigation they'll need as HR professionals.
I'm hoping this develops what the module learning outcomes call "analytical capabilities"—not just the ability to apply stakeholder theory correctly, but the capacity to recognise ethical considerations as they emerge in complex organisational life, to understand where conflicts arise, to evaluate strategic approaches that might actually enhance social performance rather than just tick compliance boxes.
Portfolio as Ethical Development Process
The portfolio format matters because ethical analysis isn't a skill you master once and deploy forever. It's ongoing practice, shaped by context, relationship, and evolving understanding of what justice requires in particular situations.
Traditional assignments ask students to demonstrate mastery of ethical frameworks through correct application. This portfolio asks them to document how they're learning to live ethically within systems they may not control—how their analysis of stakeholder conflicts becomes more sophisticated, how they develop criteria for evaluating strategic approaches, how peer discussions challenge their assumptions and expand their ethical imagination.
The assessment criteria reflect this: "use of ideas" means applying frameworks while staying open to how media sources might challenge or extend them. "Critical awareness" means developing insight into how ethical considerations operate in commercial contexts, not just identifying them. "Personal and professional reflection" means connecting this analytical development to their emerging identity as principle-led HR professionals.
Working Within and Against Institutional Logic
Of course, this all happens within a business school that still operates according to logics I'm questioning. Students are paying fees for a qualification that will help them succeed in organisations structured around profit maximisation. The module itself exists to meet professional body requirements for ethical competence.
There's productive tension here that becomes part of the curriculum. When students struggle with open-ended reflection, we explore what educational conditioning reveals about ethical thinking. When they want clearer guidelines for "right answers" about stakeholder conflicts, we examine what that suggests about how ethics gets practiced in organisational life.
The portfolio structure provides enough scaffolding—clear word counts, detailed rubrics, reflection templates—for students to engage confidently, while still asking them to sit with complexity rather than reach for premature closure. They need to demonstrate analytical development that satisfies external examiners while genuinely grappling with questions that don't have neat solutions.
What I'm Hoping This Generates
If this works, students will develop ethical analysis capabilities that can engage with the messiness of actual organisational life. They'll leave the module not with a toolkit of correct responses to ethical dilemmas, but with enhanced capacity to recognise how ethical considerations emerge in daily commercial activities, to analyse stakeholder relationships with attention to power dynamics, to evaluate strategic approaches based on what they might actually accomplish rather than what they claim to accomplish.
They'll have practice in collaborative ethical thinking that builds collective wisdom without losing analytical edge. The conversations about workplace power through Mad Men, or gig economy exploitation through documentary investigation, or care ethics through comedy might become templates for the kind of substantive ethical dialogue that HR practice desperately needs.
The portfolio becomes documentation of this analytical development: not final answers about stakeholder conflicts, but evidence of growing capacity to think ethically in relationship with others while maintaining intellectual honesty about what's at stake.
We'll see what emerges when students start working with this structure next week. The gap between what we hope assessment can accomplish and what it actually generates is where the real pedagogical work lives.