Bioethics of Death and Dying: Sample Outline

The following is a simplified, sample outline for my course on the bioethics of death and dying, based on my syllabi from 2020-2023. I omit local policies and resources, but include some of the notes and guidance I offer to students. While I list some materials I often assign, the exact assigned materials change every time I teach, as do the topics or organizations of sessions. Accordingly, this should not be understood as a reliable example of what to expect if you sign up for the course in the future!

General course description:

This course is an intermediate-level study of contemporary bioethical issues around death and dying, with a primary focus on health and healthcare systems. Among the topics we will likely discuss are issues in defining and determining death, end of life research, advance care planning, emergency medicine, pandemics, suicide, medical assistance in dying, systemic death inequities and medical oppression, global and environmental bioethics, and public policy and public health. Course members will have opportunities to shape the direction of the course through entry surveys, optional townhalls, and course engagement.

By engaging with this course, students will be better able to: identify and engage the issues, theories, and practices that inform death and dying in contemporary bioethics; critically examine philosophical and bioethical literature from multiple disciplinary frameworks; conduct self-guided research and writing on issues in death and dying; connect theories and toolkits to case studies and contemporary issues; and evaluate current and future roles for bioethics of death and dying.

Mode of delivery

This course is delivered synchronously online, with lectures recorded for review. All assessments are completed online; there are no in-person requirements for this course. We will meet twice a week using Zoom, and will use the full three hours (with breaks). We will use Canvas (“Quercus”) for all other course organization and administration, including the Ed Discussion integration. For more information on what it will mean to study online, including what steps I am taking to ensure this course is more accessible, and how online delivery changes some of our day-to-day responsibilities and policies, please review the “Learning Online” page on Canvas.

Assessments:

The assignments in this course are intended to give you opportunities not only to demonstrate your understanding and engagement with course materials, but also to leave with drafts of work that you could consider submitting to bioethics blogs or conferences, develop as writing samples, or otherwise share beyond the limited scope of our classroom. All assessments provide choice in which topics you cover, and alternative formats for assessments can be provided as accommodations.

1. Blog post (20%). Submissions will be 800-1200 words in length, reflecting the length of many bioethics blogs. Topics and more complete instructions will be released through Canvas. You will be given at least two topic options to choose from, reflecting the first half of the course.

2. Research paper (40%). Submissions will be 2000-2500 words in length, reflecting the length of many bioethics conference papers or writing samples. Topics and more complete instructions will be released through Canvas.

3. Final exam (30%). This exam is take-home, open-book, and designed to be a more time-flexible alternative to weekly reading responses. Questions will be announced throughout the term, allowing students to begin work early.

4. Engagement (10%). Your ongoing engagement with the course, either in our synchronous Zoom lectures, or other asynchronous forms of engagement (journaling, discussion boards, optional trainings). See Canvas for a list of engagement options and an explicit scoring rubric.

5. Optional assessments (varies). Throughout the course, I may announce optional assignments. These can be completed to supplement your coursework and bolster your grade, but are not necessary for doing well in this course. For example, the first optional assessment will be a feedback reflection, responding to and building from the feedback you receive on your blog post. Those who score higher on the feedback reflection than their blog post will have the weight of their blog post reduced by 5% (to 15%) and the reflection will become worth 5%. Any optional assignments will be announced in lecture and posted on Canvas.

Notes on wellbeing and discussing death

We will be actively discussing issues involving health, death, and suicide. These are not easy topics on their own, and can invite many different responses. Navigating these topics can be even more challenging in an accelerated summer course, where we will have less personal time between classes to monitor our needs and engage in forms of rest and care. These are important challenges as we begin to shape our course community, and which I encourage us to reflect on early. Meanwhile, we will often be reading or engaging content we might disagree with (I’m certainly assigning many things I disagree with!), and navigating differences in class conversations and topics.

While we are each responsible for engaging with course topics and assignments, and engaging with our peers and course community, we are also responsible for our wellbeing. I encourage you to actively explore which different engagement strategies can best support your own health and wellbeing throughout this course, and to attend to how your needs may change over time. As your instructor, I will aim to facilitate a respectful and responsive course environment, drawing on my teaching, research, and many personal experiences in bioethics and death. For example, we have designed course assignments with choice of topics, so that no student is forced to write on any single issue, and with accessible alternatives to engaging in live sessions. You can see these expressed in the assessment outlines posted to Canvas. As a course community, we will collaboratively build a more accessible and supportive learning space. We will discuss this in session one, and continue to navigate this over the duration of the term.

If you need help navigating available campus supports, learning strategies, or course materials, please feel invited to meet with me over office hours. A few available resources are listed on the “Resources and Support” page on Canvas, including academic supports, food and housing support, and health and accessibility resources. A list of discussion scripts and guidance for language in talking about death available on the “Engagement Resources” page on Canvas too.

Schedule of topics and preparation:

Note: Visit our Canvas page for the most up to date schedule and information. Required preparations are posted online under their session page, including direct links to the preparations, content notes, and guidance on what to focus on while reading.

Lectures and preparations: The assigned readings, videos, and other forms of lecture preparations are designed to help you prepare for discussions, and should be completed before class wherever possible. All lectures will assume you have at least tried to complete the required preparation, and while we will spend some time explaining them, the lectures will aim to build beyond those preparations and are not replacements for them. Still, if you do not manage to complete them in time, do still come out! We will discuss preparation expectations and strategies more directly in session one.

Choice in preparations and research: As the course progresses, you will often be given a choice of readings (or other media) to complete. In these cases, see Canvas for guidance on how to choose preparations that fit your learning goals, including your choice of paper topics etc. For example, in later sessions, you will be asked to conduct some brief research instead of a list of materials. In these cases, see Canvas for guidance on search terms and strategies, how to select articles to read, and how to use your findings to prepare for lecture. These alternative types of lecture preparation meant as practice for choosing topics and conducting research for our final paper, in addition to exploring the breadth of bioethical writing on a given topic, and we’ll discuss these methods and experiences in class. You’re encouraged to take these preparations as seriously as readings, as we will discuss our choices and findings in groupwork and class discussions.

Optional preparations: For each session, I will upload a list of further optional preparations and resources to Canvas based on our class discussions, lecture content, and contemporary issues. In previous years, this averaged ten to fifteen additional sources per session. You are not required nor expected to review these sources, and they will only be examinable to the extent we covered them explicitly in lecture. Rather, they are meant to support your further learning and research, to provide sources for the additional content I introduce in class, and to provide access to additional perspectives not always covered by core bioethics texts. You can find these listed separately on the “Extended Bibliography” page on Canvas.

Session one: Bioethics and/of death and dying

Overview: In the first sessions, we will get acquainted with the coming course and begin to broach the messiness of bioethical inquiry and practice. This session and the next are meant to reacquaint ourselves with some main approaches to bioethics from your prerequisite courses, and to critically interrogate some of the methods we’ll be using in this course, while discussing issues related to death and dying broadly. Consider this session to be a high-level overview and introduction to bioethics of death and dying. I’ll also provide some comments on how to efficiently prepare for this course; we’ll discuss this more next Monday once you’ve tried some readings as well.

We’ll open with brief access notes, followed by a brief critical history of bioethics as a discipline, approaches to doing bioethics, and why this matters for our course. We’ll dedicate time at the end to discuss any questions about the syllabus or posted course content, and will discuss any of our needs or desires around engaging with the course topics. This conversation, along with your entry surveys, will help inform the future of this course.

Required preparation: There are no academic articles assigned for today. Read through our course website, including posted documents. The syllabus and “refresher/FAQ” pages would be good starts, as well as the “learning online” and “engagement resources” page. Make a note of anything that is confusing or that you have questions about, so we can discuss them in class. Consider coming up with a possible answer to the question: “what makes something bioethics?” and “what makes something a bioethics of death and dying?” You do not need to do research on this; I’m most interested in your own thoughts.

Session two: Doing bioethics of death and dying

Overview: We’ll continue from session one by discussing the “messiness” of doing bioethics in practice. More specifically, the theme behind this session is making difficult decisions, and the consequences and affective experiences of being exposed to ethical situations, death, and dying. We will discuss some of the relationships between emotions and decision-making, referring both to philosophical methodologies around reason, emotion, and experience, and to medicalized concepts of moral distress, moral residue, grief, and trauma. How should we understand grief in our own studies of bioethics, or as an object of study in bioethics? In doing so, we’ll also discuss how bioethics might bad for us, such as in the ways the disciplines is constructed, but also in making mistakes and tough choices, and even engaging distressing content in reading. While we’ll be covering content and debates, we’ll also again use this as an opportunity to reflect on what we want this course to be, and how to navigate our needs together. We will regularly return to these issues and topics throughout the course, as we reflect on different ways of approaching bioethical issues.

Required preparation: There are three short readings for this session. You are being asked to complete all three. Review session one for tips on how to approach reading them, and see our session page for further guidance and content notes. After you finish reading, reflect: have you encountered a situation that feels like moral distress? Or where emotions played a role in what you thought was ethical? I won’t expect you to answer these in front of everyone, but they will be one way of getting into the material more deeply. Reflect further: how do these readings differ in style from one another? What was easy about reading them? What was hard? What might this tell you about your own writing styles, and what you’d like to try or to avoid?

Adrian Anzaldua & Jodi Halpern (2021) “Can clinical empathy survive? Distress, Burnout, and Malignant Duty in the Age of Covid-19”
Elizabeth Epstein and Sarah Delgado (2010) “Understanding and Addressing Moral Distress”
Deborah Carr, Kathrin Boerner, and Sara Moorman (2020) “Bereavement in the Time of Coronavirus: Unprecedented Challenges Demand Novel Interventions”

Session three: Philosophical approaches to defining death

Overview: In this session we’ll start our next unit on defining and determining death. These two focuses are related, but distinct, and together will be an important backdrop for thinking about many issues we’ll be covering in the coming weeks. To consider the distinctness, consider that philosophers can find it deceptively difficult to define something like a “chair” (if this seems easy for you, consider looking up some of the many postmodern furniture designs of the last few decades — things get weird!). But even despite those struggles in nailing down a perfect definition, we are still usually pretty good at determining whether something is a chair and identifying chairs out in the wild. Nonetheless, understanding the definition of a chair will inform how accurately we can determine what is a chair. So, in this session, we start with the more theoretical and philosophical literature that focuses on difficulties in defining “death”. In the next session, we’ll turn toward how these complications impact the medical determination of death.

How we define “death” will also help us say something about the value of death. We’ll use a portion of our session to cover some of these questions about the value of death (can it be good or bad? Is it either? Neither? When!?), and this will be a question that lingers with us for most of the course. For example, questions around MAID eligibility and even how we measure the value of life or death will also touch on these issues. Accordingly, as part of your preparation you are encouraged to think about what makes a death bad, or how we could determine what makes a death bad, as we’ll start this conversation together this week.

Required preparation: You are being assigned selections from a book, as well as a short testimony on different ways of understanding “medical assistance in dying” through the lens of medical colonialism. See Canvas for guidance, content notes, and reflection questions.

Selections from Fred Feldman (1994) Confrontations with the Reaper
Watch or read Alika LaFontaine (2016) Testimony from Meeting #10 of the Special Joint Committee on Physician Assisted Dying.

Session four: Bioethical approaches to determining death

Overview: We turn now to look at how death has been determined in medical contexts. This session introduces three of the most discussed approaches to the determination of death, including their bases in medical technological advances. We’ll start by summarizing some key issues related to the first two assigned articles. Then, we’ll branch into contemporary applications of these debates. We’ll glance at consent for apnea testing, hypothalamic function and ischemic penumbra, non-Western adoption of neurological criteria, and racist and ableist police violence and determination of death. For the more difficult content around police violence etc in class, I will provide explicit content notes and other resources when we get close to that content. I welcome your comments in the entry surveys or discussion boards for any concerns about covering this content or how best to approach it for you.

Required preparation: You are being asked to read three short articles. While you are expected to read the first two articles as listed, you have a choice for which article you read third. See Canvas for guidance on how to choose and read these articles, including content notes, and reflection questions to guide your reading and preparation.

Robert Veatch (1993) “The Impending Collapse of the Whole-Brain Definition of Death”
Robert Truog (2007) “Brain Death: Too Flawed to Endure, Too Ingrained to Abandon.”
Choice: Ivor Berkowitz and Jeremy Garrett (2020) “Legal and Ethical Considerations for Requiring Consent for Apnea Testing in Brain Death Determination” OR Yuri Terunuma and Bryan J. Mathis (2021) “Cultural sensitivity in brain death determination: a necessity in end-of-life decisions in Japan”

Session five: Evidence-based medicine and priority setting

Overview: We turn now to issues in how lives and deaths are valued and measured. This session will be focused on laying out some of the core concepts and background, and the next session will focus on how this background shows up in specific case studies. You will be introduced to concepts and issues with Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), with Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs), with quantitative research and data collection practices, and with global death data inequities. We’ll then attach this background to some issues around (e.g.) transplantation ethics, the allocation of scarce materials, and what roles empirical evidence can play in bioethics and philosophy.

Required preparation: Note that the readings are the same for both session five and six: I’m asking only that you finish them before S6. While they will help for S5, you are allowed to put them off and to prioritize your blog post assignments. See Canvas for guidance, content notes, and reflection questions.

Choice: Trisha Greenhalgh (1997) “How to read a paper in…” OR John Worrall (2021) “Statins and CVD (Cardio-Vascular Disease): Now it’s personal!”
Choice: Selections from Vincanne Adams (ed.) (2016) Metrics: What Counts in Global Health OR Joseph Fins (2021) “Disorders of Consciousness, Disability Rights and Triage During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Even the Best of Intentions Can Lead to Bias” OR Joseph A. Stramondo (2021) Tragic Choices: Disability, Triage, and Equity Amidst a Global Pandemic

Session six: Case studies in allocation and measurement

Overview: Now that we’ve developed some critical skills in interrogating priority setting and measurement, we’ll turn to look more closely at a set of case studies. The specific cases will be announced on Canvas in advance of class, and depend on your entry surveys as well as current news and recent publications. We are likely to wrap up our discussion on substance use and liver triage; as well as covering current issues with race and ventilator access during COVID-19; human milk and formula shortages for children and disabled people; and priority setting in shelter access for unhoused people during heat emergencies.

Required preparation: There are no new preparations for today, beyond those assigned in S5. If you did not complete your previous preparations for session five or before, use this day to catch up. You may also wish to review the optional preparations listed on the “Extended Bibliography” page on Canvas. Note that there will be an in-class research exercise, which is aimed to prepare you for your assignments practice research skills and time management, but also to guide and expand on our discussion. If you wish to get a head start on that research, see the “Keywords” and “Research Tips” page on Canvas.

Session seven: Environmental bioethics of death and dying

Overview: We’ll expand on some of the themes from the first half of the course to look at an environmental bioethics of death and dying. In the previous unit, we talked about issues in measurement and valuation. Before that, we asked what death and dying even are. And before that we asked what the scope of bioethics is. In today’s session, we’ll leverage all these discussions to look more closely at human death and dying in relation to the broader environment. This means we will discuss things ranging from the climate crisis and heat emergencies to urban planning, from environmental racism and colonialism to the state sanctioned killing of “invasive” species, from veterinary medicine to elephants’ expressions of “mourning.” While our focus will start from human healthcare as usually described, we will also consider some “comparative thanatology” and the problems with a human-oriented lens.

Overall, while we’ll survey many topics, the goal will be to explore how bioethics of death and dying expands beyond the clinical context that most of this course (and bioethics generally) centres. Note that we will discuss environmental violence and racism, which will contain references to sexual and physical violence against Indigenous people and racialized minorities. See Canvas for specific content notes.

Required preparation: Because our starting topics are already quite broad, I’m giving you a choice of readings. Within those choices, there are often even more choices of which chapters or selections to focus on. See Canvas for further information, content notes, and reflection questions to help guide your choice. If you’re struggling to decide what to read (a) follow your interests, (b) just pick the first one, or (c) use a random number generator and let chance decide!

Choice: Selections from Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network (2016) Violence on the Land, Violence on our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence OR Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability OR Selections from Dónal P. O’Mathúna, Bert Gordijn, and Mike Clarke (eds) (2014) Disaster Bioethics: Normative Issues When Nothing is Normal OR Pamela Calvert (dir) (2006) The Beloved Community

Session eight: Emergency medicine

Overview: We’ll return now to the emergency room. Throughout the first half of the course, we’ve made general appeals to how end-of-life emergency medicine looks quite different than standard philosophical bioethics. We’ve talked about how emergency departments are historically a relatively new phenomenon, but also how Ontario’s emergency departments have been shuttering the past few summers. We’ve generally appealed to the ways that emergency medicine requires much more urgency and limited opportunity for information gathering, and we’ll see that this poses significant issues for emergency research in more detail. Overall, we will be exploring how the last seven sessions of content apply differently in the specific context of emergency medicine, with a focus on what constitutes a “good death” and how we can obtain ethical consent for emergency research. We’ll also use some of this time to discuss advance requests for medical care, something we’ll talk about more in our sessions on MAID.

Required preparation: In this session, you’re being asked to conduct research using some of the skills we developed in previous units. I’m giving you some key words and phrases and asking you to spend some of your own time looking for academic articles on the issues and reading through them. This is important practice for the final paper, and I hope that you’ll take it seriously. We’ll also dedicate time in class for us to share and discuss some of the things we’ve found. See Canvas for guidance, content notes, and reflection questions.

Spend at least two hours total locating and reading academic articles on the ethics of “deferred consent,” and ethical issues in “do not attempt” orders (try searching with the abbreviations “DNR” or “DNACPR” or “DNI”). Not all articles you find will centre emergency medicine, but that does not mean you cannot yourself make those connections. See Canvas “Key terms” page for a description of “academic article”

Session nine: MAID and advanced planning

Overview: We’ll Introduce our unit on MAID with a focus on advance requests for care. We have talked briefly about advance directives in the previous session, and will expand on them further in the specific contexts of emergency medicine and MAID. While you have already covered MAID in your prerequisite courses, we will be exploring these issues at a deeper level and in the contemporary contexts available to us. To this end, I’ll start the session with an advanced introduction to contemporary Canadian MAID, focusing on the Truchon decision and appraising the latest annual report. Bring any of your questions about Canadian MAID itself, so we can get important clarifications or misconceptions out of the way. We’ll then review and analyze some specific issues in connecting advance requests for care to advance requests for MAID.

Required preparation: You are being given a choice of three readings, followed by brief research. See Canvas for guidance, content notes, and reflection questions.

Choice: Emily Walsh (2020) “Cognitive Transformation, Dementia, and the Moral Weight of Advance Directives” OR Selections from The Expert Panel Working Group on Advance Requests for MAID (2019) The State of Knowledge on Advance Requests for Medical Assistance in Dying OR David Miller, Rebecca Dresser, and Scott Kim (2018) “Advance Euthanasia Directives: A Controversial Case and Its Ethical Implications”
Research: Spend at least 30 minutes conducting research on disabled perspectives on advance care planning, particularly for MAID. Reflect not only on the content of what you found and how it differs from above sources, but also on the experience of searching for those perspectives and how you found them.
Research: Spend at least 20 minutes conducting research on advance care planning (ACP) tools. What tools or resources are easily accessible by search engines? What do those tools look like, and what do they ask of people who fill them out? What seems to be missing from them? (Hint: There may be a bonus assignment concerning ACP tools posted soon).

Session ten: MAID, access, and choice

Overview: We’ll follow up our discussions of MAID with attention to access and choice. Many argue about whether we should have expanded or constrained access to MAID (if at all), and the coming year will potentially see the introduction of MAID for those who have a psychiatric condition or mental disorder as their sole underlying medical condition (“MD-SUMC”; you’ll have a chance to explore this in your research paper). Meanwhile, other scholars and activists interrogate the framing of MAID as a choice: who gets to choose, whose choices are coerced or imposed, and what it means to frame MAID as a choice at all given current structures of medical power, discourses, and inadequate social resources and support? We’ll begin by continuing our discussions of the “slippery slope” concern and different types of evidence (experiences and testimonies, Government data, philosophical thought experiments). Then we will cover a few further questions about access and coercion or the construction of choice. We’ll spend the final half hour addressing any emerging issues from the past weeks, and lingering questions from your research and preparation on MAID.

Required preparation: You are once again being asked to choose one preparation (readings or webinars), and then conduct some brief research. See Canvas for guidance, content notes, and reflection questions.

Choice: Disability Justice Network of Ontario (2021) “Death by Coercion: Panel Discussion on Impacts of Changes to Medical Assistance in Dying” OR MAID House (2023) “Accessibility and MAID: The Impact of Forced Transfers” OR Selected posts from BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OR Selections from Alexandre Baril (2023) Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide
Research: Spend at least 20 minutes conducting research on something that you are interested in about MAID. Spend a few minutes thinking about what MAID issues interest you most. Then conduct some of your own research around that interest, focusing both on academic sources and testimonial evidence. It is okay if you research on a topic we have covered; in that case, go into further depth beyond our required and optional preparations.

Session eleven: Bioethics and critical approaches to suicide

Reminder: This course is full of difficult topics, and many entry surveys identify suicide as a particularly difficult subject, both philosophically and emotionally. Many people in this course will have experiences with suicide in one form or another, including ongoing relationships to suicide right now, and I’ll even appeal to some of my own experiences when teaching this content. One of the limitations on COVID-19 learning, in particular, is that we don’t have the fuller opportunity to build up a physical shared space in a way that serves us all better. Many of us will be joining from home environments not always in our control, such as family homes, and this also prevents us from engaging or helping support other people in their environments too. As such, I want to welcome and remind you to engage with this course when and how it benefits you. While we are all responsible for covering the course content, you are invited to choose when and how you do so: recall that you can gain engagement points even if you choose to miss a given lecture, and the recordings will be available to you after. I’m happy to meet further by email or office hours to support your engagement.

Overview: In this session we will take up the topic of suicide, an often stigmatized and uncritically discussed phenomenon in bioethics, yet a global leading cause of deaths for many communities. There are two main goals with this session. First, to introduce us to arguments from critical suicidology that interrogate existing norms in bioethics. Second, to review and apply the various themes and topics we’ve covered throughout the course in a novel context. For example, we’ll be variously returning to issues in the badness of death, in defining and determining death, in valuing and measuring forms of death, in local versus structural interventions, in discrimination and oppression, in the construction of choices and agency, and even the relationships between suicide and MAID. In the meanwhile, if you have something you’re hoping to learn about suicide today, post it to the discussion board! I will try to inform some of today’s content around the questions we receive.

Required preparation: You are being asked to first choose an introductory chapter on suicidology and critical approaches to suicide, and to then choose any other chapter from three books that appeals to you. See Canvas for guidance, content notes, and reflection questions.

Choice: Jennifer White et al (2015) “Introduction: Rethinking Suicide” OR Mark Button and Ian Marsh (2020) “Introduction” OR Roland Chrisjohn and Shaunessy McKay (2017) “Double, Double, Toilet Trouble: Research, Theory, and Practice in Indigenous Suicide.”
Choice: Selections from Jennifer White et al (eds) (2015) Critical Suicidology: Transforming Suicide Research and prevention for the 21st Century OR Selections from Mark Button and Ian Marsh (eds) (2020) Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention OR Selections from Roland Chrisjohn, Shaunessy McKay, and Andrea Smith (2017) Dying to Please You: Indigenous Suicide in Contemporary Canada OR Selections from Alexandre Baril (2023) Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide

Session twelve: Making a difference

Overview: In our last session together, we’ll cover a brief overview of the course and discuss the question of “what comes next?” What do we do with all that we’ve learned? What opportunities or questions or perspectives have we opened up? How do we take any of this content to make a meaningful difference in death and dying? In this scope, we’ll also ask: What is the value or purpose of a course like this? What is the value of spending this time and money and energy on academic readings, lectures, and assessments when we could be spending these resources on community support? What do these answers suggest for how we can make a difference to death and dying in our own lives, communities, and the broader world? We’ll begin with a course overview and discussion of remaining assignments for the first half hour. In the second hour, we’ll discuss questions of what comes next, and I will have prepared content and discussion prompts. In the final hour, I’ll put myself in the hotseat, answering any lingering questions you might have about the bioethics of death and dying, including content we didn’t have opportunities to discuss in our limited time together, or even questions about my own positions on the issues we’ve covered.

Required preparation: There are no additional required materials assigned for this session. Instead, you are encouraged to review your course notes, catch up on any missed content, and come prepared to discuss some of the reflection questions described in the overview. See Canvas for guidance, content notes, and reflection questions.