Representative Student Work

Exemplars of inquiry, reflection, and ethical analysis

This page presents anonymized excerpts of student work from HTHSCI 3DT3: Organ Donation and Transplantation. The excerpts are shared to illustrate the kinds of thinking, writing, and ethical engagement the course asks of students over time. They are not intended as templates or model answers. Rather, they are offered as exemplars because they demonstrate disciplined inquiry, careful problem framing, and the capacity to remain thoughtful in the presence of uncertainty, disagreement, loss, and moral strain.

Across the course, students are repeatedly asked to resist premature closure: to listen without instrumentalizing lived experience, to diagnose rather than solve complex problems, and to stay present when clarity is unavailable or incomplete. The work shared here reflects those expectations. Excellence in this course is not defined by certainty or decisiveness, but by intellectual restraint, ethical seriousness, and the ability to hold competing values without collapsing into defensiveness or oversimplification.

All excerpts are reproduced with identifying details removed. Attribution is limited to course and year of submission (e.g., HTHSCI 3DT3 student, 2024). The focus is intentionally placed on the work itself rather than on individual authorship, in order to support a learning environment where students can take intellectual and ethical risks.

The examples are organized into four sections, each corresponding to a major assignment type in the course. Together, they offer a window into how students engage with lived experience, ethical theory, policy, and real-world clinical and system-level complexity.

Guest Speaker Reflections
Learning through lived experience

This section presents excerpts from reflections written after sessions with donor families, transplant recipients, coordinators, clinicians, and others working within the donation and transplant system. Students listen without note-taking and then reflect on what they heard, how it challenged assumptions, and how lived experience reshapes ethical and system-level understanding.

The strongest reflections demonstrate disciplined listening, moral humility, and the capacity to witness grief, generosity, and ambiguity without rushing to interpretation or resolution.

→ View Guest Speaker Reflections

Critical Connections
Integrative ethical inquiry across course concepts

Critical Connections assignments ask students to identify and explore meaningful relationships between two or more course concepts. The emphasis is on synthesis rather than summary, and on generating questions of real value rather than arriving at conclusions.

The exemplars shared here show students connecting ethics, clinical practice, policy, and lived experience to reframe familiar ideas such as permanence, consent, autonomy, trust, and equity. The strongest work exposes hidden values, interrogates assumptions of neutrality, and treats uncertainty as a feature of ethical life rather than a flaw to eliminate.

→ View Critical Connections

Case Reflections and Problem Refinement
Working with ethical, clinical, and social complexity

Case reflections are grounded in complex real-world scenarios drawn from organ donation and transplantation, including death determination, family disagreement, normothermic regional perfusion (NRP), consent, media scrutiny, and system failure.

Students are not asked to solve cases. Instead, they are asked to identify core problems, examine competing values, and reflect on responsibility, loss, and trust. The strongest reflections demonstrate adaptive diagnosis: staying with ethical remainder, recognizing where process becomes morally consequential, and naming what persists even when procedures are correct.

→ View Case Reflections

Now That You Know
When knowledge becomes responsibility

This assignment was given in conjunction with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Students were asked to reflect on how learning about organ donation, transplantation, and healthcare systems intersects with histories of colonial harm, mistrust, and inequity.

The work shared here illustrates learning that alters identity and responsibility. Rather than offering moral certainty or resolution, students write from a place of implication, acknowledging what becomes harder to ignore once something is understood and how knowledge carries ethical weight that cannot be set aside.

→ View Now That You Know

Attribution and student recognition

The excerpts on these pages are presented anonymously to protect privacy and to keep attention focused on the substance of the work. If a student recognizes their writing and would like to be credited, they are welcome to contact me directly and share the original submission. With their permission, attribution can be added.

Returning to the course

These exemplars offer a partial view of how students engage with HTHSCI 3DT3. The full structure of the course, including its teaching approach, assignments, guest speakers, and expectations, is described on the main course page.

→ Return to the HTHSCI 3DT3 course page