From Knowledge Transmission to Value Formation: Reform Practice of Contextualized Teaching in Medical Ethics

Abstract

In the context of the ongoing advancement of New Medical Education, the Healthy China strategy, and initiatives to strengthen medical humanistic care, the course Medical Ethics has been entrusted with an educational mission that extends beyond the transmission of disciplinary knowledge. In conventional teaching, course objectives have often remained at the level of conveying ethical principles, norms, and institutional rules, while giving insufficient attention to students’ humanistic perception, value judgment, and moral action. This has easily produced a structural dilemma in which students know ethical concepts but cannot make sound judgments, and can recite principles but struggle to enter concrete situations. With the enhancement of humanistic literacy as its core orientation, this article selects contextualized teaching as its point of entry and, on the basis of existing curriculum-reform designs, systematically discusses the theoretical rationale, implementation framework, practical pathways, and directions for improvement involved in transforming Medical Ethics from a knowledge-transmission course into a value-generating course. The article argues that contextualized teaching is not a simple supplement to traditional lecturing; rather, it is a reconstruction of the classroom centered on real problems, role experience, value conflict, and reflective expression. By bringing clinical ethical conflicts, tensions in doctor–patient relationships, life-and-death decision-making dilemmas, and ethical issues raised by emerging technologies into the classroom, the course can move students from abstract principles to situational judgment, from one-way reception of knowledge to dialogic engagement among multiple subjects, and from external understanding of norms to internal identification with values. Drawing on the project plan and preliminary pilot experience, this article further proposes a reform logic of goal reshaping, content reorganization, method reconstruction, and evaluation redesign. It emphasizes the combination of situational introduction, role-playing, structured discussion, reflective writing, and multidimensional assessment in order to strengthen the humanistic educational effectiveness of the course. At the same time, it points out that, if the contextualized reform of Medical Ethics is to genuinely achieve value formation, further progress is still needed in case-bank development, teacher competence, clinical collaboration, and evaluation tools.