ABSTRACT
Mary Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum is a relatively new and exciting addition to the tools available to accounting professors for teaching ethics. The overarching goal of the offering is to increase the likelihood that a person will take purposeful action when they encounter an ethical issue (Gentile, 2010). The curriculum has been adopted by over 1,000 organizations across the globe primarily due to the ease with which it can be implemented as a stand-alone training module and/or integrated into an existing ethics training program. The offering includes discipline-specific cases so it can be adopted in virtually any industry or profession. After personally testing its effectiveness on nearly a thousand undergraduate accounting students over the last five years, we find it effective not only in increasing the likelihood that students will act on their values but also in increasing student confidence and providing them with skills needed to effectively deal with the ethical issues they are likely to encounter once they enter the accounting profession. We also believe it increases students’ critical thinking skills, develops a questioning mindset (professional skepticism) and makes it less likely they will subordinate their own judgment to others like a supervisor, organization or client. This chapter provides the details on how to easily integrate the GVV curriculum into any accounting class and includes a case study with teaching notes as well.
