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1. Engineering Ethics Education for Social Justice

   Douglas, Elliot P.; Holbrook, J. Britt (January 2020, Frontiers in education)

   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 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. 

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2. Using Reflexive Principlism to Investigate Longitudinal Changes in Engineering Students’ Perceptions of Ethics

   https://doi.org/10.21061/see.115  

   Claussen, Stephanie A; Stepback, Lazlo; Jesiek, Brent K; Zoltowski, Carla B; Howland, Shiloh James (March 2024, Studies in Engineering Education)

   Background: Studies of changes in engineering students’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility over time have often resulted in mixed results or shown only small longitudinal shifts. Comparisons across different studies have been difficult due to the diverse frameworks that have been used for measurement and analysis in research on engineering ethics and have revealed major gaps between the measurement tools and instruments available to assess engineering ethics and the complexity of ethical and social responsibility constructs. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to understand how engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change over the four years of their undergraduate degrees and to explore the use of reflexive principlism as an organizing framework for analyzing these changes. Design/Method: We used qualitative interviews of engineering students to explore multiple facets of their understanding of ethics and social responsibility. We interviewed 33 students in their first and fourth years of their undergraduate studies. We then inductively analyzed the pairs of interviews, using the reflexive principlism framework to formulate our findings. Results: We found that engineering students in their fourth year of studies were better able to engage in balancing across multiple ethical principles and specification of said ethical principles than they could as first year students. They most frequently referenced nonmaleficence and, to a lesser degree, beneficence as relevant ethical principles at both time points, and were much less likely to reference justice and autonomy. Conclusions: This work shows the potential of using reflexive principlism as an analytical framework to illuminate the nuanced ways that engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change and develop over time. Our findings suggest reflexive principlism may also be useful as a pedagogical approach to better equip students to specify and balance all four principles when ethical situations arise. 

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3. How do ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion relate in engineering? A systematic review

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20571  

   Hess, Justin L.; Lin, Athena; Whitehead, Andrew; Katz, Andrew (January 2024, Journal of Engineering Education)

   Abstract BackgroundThis 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. PurposeWe investigate the research question, “How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer‐reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?” DesignWe 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. ResultsWe 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). ConclusionsThere 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. 

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4. Critical, Motivated, Hopeful: Empowering Students Through Sociotechnical Data Science Ethics Education

   https://doi.org/10.5840/tej202478152  

   Özkan, Desen S; Rabb, Nicholas (January 2024, Teaching Ethics)

   Ethics education and societal understandings are critical to an education in engineering. However, researchers have found that students do not always see ethics as a part of engineering. In this paper, we present a sociotechnical approach to teaching ethics around the topic of surveillance technology in an interdisciplinary, co-designed and co-taught course. We describe and reflect on our curricular and pedagogical approach that uplifts cross-disciplinary dialogue, social theoretical frameworks to guide ethical thinking, and highlighting collective action and resistance in our course content and praxis to inspire students. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of student reflection writing, we examine the ways students relate society and technology, generate ethical skills and questions, and are motivated to act. We find that, in fact, this approach resonates with student experience and desire for discipline-specific ethical analysis, and is highly motivating. 

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5. Comparing engineering ethics education across institutions using case study: Methodological and conceptual problems [Work in Progress]

   Clancy, Rockwell; Zhu, Qin; Streiner, Scott; Thorpe, Ryan (January 2023, 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   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. 

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