Title: Engineering Ethics Education for Social Justice
This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper describes incorporation of social justice into engineering ethics education. Current teaching of engineering ethics pays inadequate attention to social justice, mirroring engineering education in general. While many authors have called for a reconsideration of the fundamental canons of engineering ethics, there has been relatively less work on teaching and developing ethics from viewpoints that highlight social justice. We have recently begun a project to address this gap, focusing on curriculum design and collecting preliminary data to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. In this paper we describe the theoretical foundations for the class, the design principles, and the research approach to determine its effectiveness. more »« less
Douglas, Elliot P.; Holbrook, J. Britt(
, Proceedings Frontiers in Education Conference)
null
(Ed.)
This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper describes incorporation of social justice into engineering ethics education. Current teaching of engineering ethics pays inadequate general. While many authors have called for a reconsideration of the fundamental canons of engineering ethics, there has been relatively less work on teaching and developing ethics from viewpoints that highlight social justice. We have recently begun a project to address this gap, focusing on curriculum design and collecting preliminary data to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. In this paper we describe the theoretical foundations for the class, the design principles, and the research approach to determine its effectiveness.
This paper begins with the premise that ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) overlap in engineering. Yet, the topics of ethics and DEI often inhabit different scholarly spaces in engineering education, thus creating a divide between these topics in engineering education research, teaching, and practice.
Purpose
We investigate the research question, “How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer‐reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?”
Design
We used systematic review procedures to synthesize intersections between ethics and DEI in engineering education scholarly literature. We extracted literature from engineering and engineering education databases and used thematic analysis to identify ethics/DEI connections.
Results
We identified three primary themes (each with three sub‐themes): (1) lenses that serve to connect ethics and DEI (social, justice‐oriented, professional), (2) roots that inform how ethics and DEI connect in engineering (individual demographics, disciplinary cultures, institutional cultures); and (3) engagement strategies for promoting ethics and DEI connections in engineering (affinity toward ethics/DEI content, understanding diverse stakeholders, working in diverse teams).
Conclusions
There is a critical mass of engineering education scholars explicitly exploring connections between ethics and DEI in engineering. Based on this review, potential benefits of integrating ethics and DEI in engineering include cultivating a socially just world and shifting engineering culture to be more inclusive and equitable, thus accounting for the needs and values of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.
Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments present challenges to effective engineering ethics training. This paper is part of a larger research project that aims to examine the effects of culture and education on ethics training in undergraduate engineering students at universities in the United States, China, and the Netherlands. We are interested in how students’ curricular and extra-curricular (e.g., internships, service projects) experiences and training impact their ethical reasoning and moral dispositions, and how this differs cross-culturally. To understand this, we are conducting mixed methods research longitudinally over four years to engineering students at our participating universities to gauge their moral dispositions and ethical reasoning skills and to measure any change in these.
This work-in-progress paper, however, is not about the direct outcomes of this research project. Rather, it critically examines our own practices and methods in doing this research. We begin the paper by briefly introducing the larger research project and motivating the use of comparative, multi-institutional case studies as necessary for contextualizing, complementing, and interpreting quantitative data on ethical reasoning and moral dispositions. Because the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per participating institution for institutional (and also likely cultural) reasons, interpreting and analyzing quantitative survey data will require understanding contextual conditions of education at each institution. Comparative case studies can supply missing contextual information to provide a more complete picture of the engineering ethics educational contexts, strategies, and practices at each of the participating universities.
However, in considering how to design and conduct these case studies, we realized we were operating under certain assumptions such as ethics in engineering as separate (and separable from) the “real,” or technical engineering curriculum. These assumptions have been widely problematized in engineering ethics education (Cech, 2014; Tormey et al. 2015; Polmear et al. 2019); they are assumptions that we in our teaching and research attempt to dispel. Our paper considers (and invites discussion on) the broader implications of methodological design in conducting cross-cultural multi-sited case studies in engineering ethics education research. It explores models for designing and conducting our case studies so as not to reproduce pernicious ideas about social and ethical issues in engineering as subsidiary “interventions” in the “actual,” (i.e., technical) curriculum. More generally we discuss how engineering ethics education research methods can be harnessed to overcome this established division.
Zhu, Qin; Kim, Dayoung; Snieder, Roel(
, Teaching Ethics)
In this paper, we argue that engineering ethics education does have moral implications. More specifically, practices in engineering ethics education can lead to negative moral consequences if not conducted appropriately. Engineering ethics educators are often passionate about teaching students ways to examine the ethical implications of engineering and technology. However, ethics educators may overlook the moral significance of their instructional classroom practices. In this paper, we discuss two issues: First, we discuss the moral impacts of ethics curriculum and pedagogies on students’ learning experiences. Then we discuss the professional responsibilities of educators who are involved in designing ethics learning experiences for engineering students. The reflections presented in this paper will serve as catalysts for more comprehensive discussions regarding the impact of engineering ethics education on the ethical development of engineering students.
Hess, J. L.; Whitehead, A.; Jesiek, B.; Katz, A.; Riley, D.(
, Frontiers in Education)
In this work-in-progress (WIP) study, we begin to identify explicit links between ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in engineering education and closely related fields. We use systematic literature review procedures coupled with a qualitative content analytic approach to identify these explicit links within engineering education journals and conference papers. Through this WIP, we identify preliminary themes that represent explicit discourses connecting ethics and DEI and we cite associated literature. We unpack four themes that have a prominent presence in the abstracts that we have reviewed: cultural, global, social, and sustainable. These explicit connections will support future systematic review procedures wherein we will aim to identify implicit DEI and ethics connections via an analysis of whole manuscripts. While preliminary, we hope that these four themes can prompt strategies to connect ethics and DEI more purposefully when teaching towards these and related topics.
Douglas, Elliot P., and Holbrook, J. Britt. Engineering Ethics Education for Social Justice. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10204031. Frontiers in education .
Douglas, Elliot P., & Holbrook, J. Britt. Engineering Ethics Education for Social Justice. Frontiers in education, (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10204031.
Douglas, Elliot P., and Holbrook, J. Britt.
"Engineering Ethics Education for Social Justice". Frontiers in education (). Country unknown/Code not available. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10204031.
@article{osti_10204031,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Engineering Ethics Education for Social Justice},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10204031},
abstractNote = {This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper describes incorporation of social justice into engineering ethics education. Current teaching of engineering ethics pays inadequate attention to social justice, mirroring engineering education in general. While many authors have called for a reconsideration of the fundamental canons of engineering ethics, there has been relatively less work on teaching and developing ethics from viewpoints that highlight social justice. We have recently begun a project to address this gap, focusing on curriculum design and collecting preliminary data to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. In this paper we describe the theoretical foundations for the class, the design principles, and the research approach to determine its effectiveness.},
journal = {Frontiers in education},
author = {Douglas, Elliot P. and Holbrook, J. Britt},
editor = {null}
}
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