Grant Park wins provincial title at Ethics Bowl

Grant Park High School soared to an impressive first place finish at the 2022 Manitoba High School Ethics Bowl Regional Tournament.

Students May Zhao, Maya Paille, Eniola Soetan, Weldon Scott, Sarah Rossen and Varshini Ramansivakumar represented Grant Park at the Feb. 25 competition, which was held online due to the pandemic.

The provincial competition is hosted annually by the Manitoba Association for Rights and Liberties. 

"Ethics competitions are collaborative competitions where teams analyze and discuss ethical issues and dilemmas. The purpose is to explore moral and ethical stances and pose questions to deepen understanding of these complex issues. Teams are evaluated on their ability to communicate and collaborate, the strength of their research, and the intellectual improvisation of responding to another team’s ideas. The issues are generally broad, current, conflictual, and above all, ethically fraught. Unlike the skilled oppositional nature of debate, this competition emphasizes collaborative dialogic skills," said Dr. Katherine Kristalovich, a Grant Park teacher and coach of the school’s ethics team. 

Students explored some tricky ethical dilemmas at the tournament. Here are some of the topics they analyzed during ethics bowl competition:

• Online shopping - are there measures government should adopt to ameliorate unfortunate effects of this retail revolution?
• Homelessness - what responsibility do we have for those in our community living in need? What do we owe the most vulnerable in our society? 
• Tourism - do individuals have an ethical responsibility to mitigate the harmful effects of their travels?
• Reproduction in an overpopulated world – do people living today have an individual moral obligation to help mitigate against the putative effects of human overpopulation by refraining from reproducing?
• Worker shortages and CERB - how much should an individual be expected to compromise their own mental and physical well-being to contribute to society by joining the workforce?
• Bill 21 - does this truly promote state neutrality when Christianity is still the most popular religion in Quebec?

While students had the opportunity to research these questions ahead of time, these were indeed ethical conundrums that had no easy answers. Throw in some stiff competition from the other schools—particularly École secondaire Kelvin High School, who have performed well at previous ethics bowls—and the Grant Park team had its hands full.

“A major challenge we had during the competition was simply that all the other teams were really good,” said student Varshini Ramansivakumar. “It was clear that they had researched a lot and discussed these cases amongst themselves at great lengths. It made us have to work harder to be able to respond to their questions and that’s what made the competition a great experience. It challenged all of us to think outside of the box and learn new perspectives about our cases that we hadn’t thought of before.”

Students said that fluid thinking and being able to adapt on-the-fly were key skills for competition.

“A key part of performing well is being able to quickly come up with alternative perspectives on an issue, as well as being receptive to what the other team has to say,” said student May Zhao. “I think things such as keeping an open mind and avoiding being too attached to a particular angle or set of ideas is a skill that helps tremendously in this competition.”

Student Eniola Soetan said that adaptive reasoning was a critical skill: “I think ethics bowl requires you to have a level of flexibility and quick thinking because no matter how much you know your material and how much you’ve practiced in research, you have to be able to adequately and quickly respond to whatever the other team says to you and whatever questions they may pose.”

The Grant Park students were able to gel as a team when it counted the most.

“I think we were so successful because we were all really eager to work together and cared about the cases. I could not have asked for a better team,” said student Sarah Rossen. “I was really grateful I had such a great team full of intelligent people to work with. We prepared by researching and discussing different aspects of the cases and bringing up arguments that deepen our understanding of the problem.” 

The Grant Park team now moves on to the Canadian High School Ethics Bowl, which takes place April 28-30 here in Winnipeg. 

Regardless of the outcome of the national competition, the Grant Park students said they have made some new friends and deepened existing friendships as a result of participating on the school’s ethics team.

“Aside from the members who were in the same grade, many of us didn’t know each other or weren’t close to each other before being on this team. I think that over the course of preparing for the competition, all of us grew closer because we were all working towards one goal, and that was trying our best,” Varshini said.