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1. What Role do Civil Engineering Students See for their Profession in the COVID-19 Response?

   LaPatin, M. L.; Poleacovschi, C.; Padgett Walsh, K.; Feinstein, S. G.; Rutherford, C.; Nguyen, L. M.; Faust, K. M.; Verses, L. (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   Engineering education typically focuses on technical knowledge rather than ethical development. When ethics are incorporated into curriculum, the focus is usually on microethics concerning issues that arise in particular contexts and interactions between individuals, rather than macroethics that address broad societal concerns. The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a unique opportunity to assess macroethical understanding because unjust social, economic, and environmental systems have been brought to the forefront of the response. In this study, we aim to understand students’ awareness of unjust systems and the ethical responsibilities of engineers. At the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, in April 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate engineering students at two universities. We asked students to explain what they perceived to be the role of the engineering profession in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on the responses of undergraduate civil engineering students, totaling a sample size of 84 students across two universities. We used qualitative analyses (deductive and inductive coding) to categorize responses between “macroethics is present” and “macroethics is not present”, and we used quantitative analysis to test the two categories with sociodemographic factors for association. We show that there are statistically significant differences across student responses given certain sociodemographic factors. Responses from women focused more on macroethics as compared to responses from men. There was also a difference in responses between the universities surveyed, showing that institutional differences may impact students’ macroethical development. Potential implications from this study include recommendations on curricular content and identifying which student demographic groups would benefit most from intentional macroethical content in coursework. Additionally, increasing diversity and representation of women in engineering may impact the engineering industry’s focus on macroethics. 

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2. Ethics in engineering or engineering in ethics?

   Fore, G. A.; Hess, J. L.; Katz, A. (June 2020, ASEE annual conference exposition)

   This paper explores how the relationship between ethics and engineering has been and could be framed. Specifically, two distinct framings will be conceptualized and explored: ethics in engineering and engineering in ethics. As with other disciplines, engineering typically subsumes ethics, appropriating it as its own unique subfield. As a framing, ethics in engineering produces specialized standards, codes, values, perspectives, and problems distinct to engineering thought and practice. These form an engineering education discourse with which engineers engage. It is epistemological in its focus, meaning that this framing constructs knowledge of proper disciplinary conduct. On the other hand, engineering in ethics as a framing device insists that engineering become a specialized articulation of ethical thought and action. Here, “engineer” and “engineering” are not nouns but verbs, referring to particular processes and technologies for transformation. One is not an “engineer;” rather, one “engineers.” One is first an ethical subject – an historical aggregate of continuous experiences/becomings – concerned with the pursuit of “the good” in the present; then, when contextually relevant, such a subject’s engineering knowledge and skills may be employed as powerful means for the becoming-good of shared worlds. In this paper, engineering in ethics is further conceptualized through a playful intermingling of an ethic of care, via the scholarship of Joan Tronto, and a Deweyian approach to ethical inquiry. Tronto’s four elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness – are joined with what are arguably four key components of Dewey’s process of ethical inquiry: awareness, judgment, experimentation, and iteration. This paper argues that 1) being attentive is required to achieve awareness of a given need or problem, 2) taking responsibility is a necessary practice for making and acting on one’s judgements related to the need at hand, 3) competence in a relevant skill is needed to experiment with one’s judgements, and 4) careful consideration of how others respond to how one has addressed a need is essential for the purposes of iteration. While all four contribute to the notion of engineering in ethics, the relationship between competence and experimentation is where engineering is most evidently seized as an ethical expression. How one competently wields engineering knowledge and skillfully performs disciplinary techniques is, here, foremost about actively inquiring into how to provide care for a specific need and, in doing so, creating a world aligned with one’s vision of “the good.” This paper will close with a brief consideration of the educational implications of engineering in ethics. 

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3. Board 240: Developing Critically Conscious Aerospace Engineers through Macroethics Curricula: Year 1

   Johnson, Aaron W; Bowen, Corin L; Strehl, Elizabeth A; Olson, Sabrina; Elias, Ricardo (June 2024, American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) PEER)

   Absent from the undergraduate aerospace curricula at many universities is any acknowledgement of macroethics, the ways in which engineering impacts society positively and negatively. Without putting aerospace engineering in its social context, students are left ill-prepared to recognize and address challenging ethical questions and issues they will encounter in their future engineering careers. Alternatively, aerospace engineering curricula should support the development of the critical consciousness required to reflect on the social impact of the field and students’ present and future roles within it. We are addressing this pressing need with integrated research and curriculum development. Our multi-institutional team is composed of aerospace and engineering education research faculty, graduate students in engineering education, undergraduate students in engineering, and practitioners in the aerospace industry. The overarching objective of our design-based research project is to investigate how a macroethical curriculum can be effectively integrated into aerospace engineering science courses. To do this, we ask two research questions to inform the curriculum: RQ1) What are undergraduate students’ current awareness and perceptions of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering?, and RQ2) In what ways do students feel their education is or is not preparing them to address macroethical issues? We also pose a question to assess our curriculum: RQ3) How does the macroethical curriculum impact students’ perceptions and awareness of macroethical issues and their desire to engage with the macroethical implications of their future work? In this poster, we will describe the development and iteration of macroethics lessons in multiple aerospace engineering courses, along with an assessment of the lessons through instructor reflections and quantitative student feedback. We will also describe the development of a survey to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses of students’ awareness and perception of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering. We will also present preliminary results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. 

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4. Work in Progress: Creation of a Macroethics Case Study Integrated into an Aerospace Systems Design Course

   Olson, Sabrina; Jia-Richards, Oliver; Johnson, Aaron W (June 2025, American Society for Engineering Education)

   Ethics and social responsibility education within aerospace engineering remains limited, with education on the subject often disconnected from technical course content and led by guest lecturers. While still valuable, this approach inadvertently signals to students that such topics are an addendum to their work as engineers, and reinforces the misconception of engineering as an apolitical field. Furthermore, existing ethical discussions place focus on the microethical realm, examining the ethical implications of individual decisions within the profession. This microethical focus, while important, overlooks the wider impact of engineering technologies on society. Contrastingly, macroethics addresses the collective social responsibility of the engineering field, emphasizing the ethical concerns of engineering technology. However, the abstract and qualitative nature of these macroethical concepts often conflicts with the more quantitative content of technical engineering classes, complicating efforts to integrate them into engineering coursework. This work-in-progress paper presents an example of how macroethical concepts can be embedded into traditional technical classes to foster student awareness of their ethical responsibilities as future engineers. An in-class macroethics activity and follow-up assignment were implemented in an aerospace engineering capstone design course at the University of Michigan. In the in-class activity, the technical concept of spaceports, or facilities designed for spacecraft launch, and the macroethical concepts of rightsholder analysis were specifically selected to complement the course topic of spacecraft systems design. As such, the course structure was designed to present macroethical considerations as equivalent to other systems design requirements. The in-class activity encompassed a full course period and was both developed and presented by the course instructor, with the follow-up assignment appearing in the final student group reports. The aim of the in-class activity was to increase student awareness of macroethical effects, asking the broader question of who/what is impacted when an engineering decision is made. To this end, activities of rightsholder identification and power-impact mapping were implemented, along with small-group and full-class dialogue. Students were asked to select a location for a spaceport within their university’s host state, consider the impact of their choice by identifying the rightsholders affected, and compare and contrast the differences in power and impact of these affected parties. Following the lesson, students repeated this process as part of their final course project, considering the social impacts as part of their space system design process. The instructor's experience of developing and implementing the in-class macroethics lesson and activities is examined within this paper, with focus placed on the decisions made within course structuring and lesson planning to present macroethical content as equivalent in importance to technical content. Discussion of learning goals and pedagogy will be shared with aims to identify key aspects of the macroethics lesson that may be implemented in other courses. Future work by the authors will seek to further develop this core set of facilitation goals, and integrate student data into evaluating effectiveness of the lesson in developing students’ macroethical awareness. 

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5. Work in Progress: Navigating Undergraduates’ Perspectives on Macroethical Dilemmas in Aerospace Engineering

   Strehl, Elizabeth A; Olson, S; Bowen, Corin L; Johnson, Aaron W (June 2024, American Society for Engineering Education)

   This work-in-progress study aims to qualitatively examine undergraduate students’ understanding of ethical dilemmas in aerospace engineering. Macroethics is particularly relevant within the aerospace industry as engineers are often asked to grapple with multi-faceted issues such as sustainable aviation, space colonization, or the military industrial complex. Macroethical education, the teaching of collective social responsibility within the engineering profession and societal decisions about technology, is traditionally left out of undergraduate engineering curricula. This lack of macroethics material leaves students underprepared to address the broader impacts of their discipline on society. Including macroethical content in the classroom helps novice engineers better understand the real implications of their work on humanity. Previous literature has explored how specific pedagogical interventions impact students’ decision-making, but few studies delve into undergraduate students’ awareness and perceptions of the issues themselves. Thus, it is essential to examine how students’ perceptions of macroethical dilemmas are evolving in order for instructors to effectively meet the needs of their students. This study addresses the need to better understand student awareness of macroethical issues by extending upon previous research to qualitatively analyze responses from an iteration of a macroethical perceptions survey (n = 81) administered to undergraduate aerospace engineers at a large, Midwestern, predominantly white, research-intensive, public university. Our prior work has been used to develop and iterate upon a mixed-methods survey that seeks to understand students’ perceptions of ethical issues within the aerospace discipline. In the most recent version of our survey instrument, thirty-one Likert-scale questions asked about students’ feelings towards the current state of aerospace engineering and their ideal state of the aerospace field. Within this survey, eight Likert-scale prompts are followed by open-ended questions asking students to explain their answers in-depth. For instance, if students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘It is important to me to use my career as an aerospace engineer to make a positive difference in the world.’, a follow-up item asked students to explain what positive differences they would like to make in the world. Student responses were analyzed using a combination of a deductive and inductive thematic analyses. Researchers first applied an a priori coding scheme onto responses that was initially developed using constructivist grounded theory, then used inductive analysis to account for new themes that naturally emerged within the data. The analysis delved deeper into students’ moral engagement towards ethical issues, their perceptions of who is affected by these dilemmas, and how they have seen these dilemmas addressed in both academic and professional settings. Preliminary results from the study identified that students have a wide spectrum of awareness of relevant issues and express varying levels of acceptance about the state of aerospace engineering.While some students exhibited signs of inattentiveness, or limited ability to consider viewpoints beyond their own, others demonstrated abilities to see multiple perspectives and critically analyze systems of power that influence how macroethical issues are addressed. Similarly, students also demonstrated varying degrees of acceptance, some demonstrating signs of apathy or moral disengagement regarding the field of aerospace engineering, others indicating signs of conflict, or a heightened state of stress about opposing ideals and values, and a final group of students indicating a desire to challenge or reform the existing culture of the discipline. These emergent themes will be used to inform teaching practices concerning engineering ethics education, refine future iterations of macroethics lesson content and survey instruments, and further incentivize the integration of macroethical content throughout aerospace engineering curricula. 

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