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1. Responsibility and Accountability: Faculty Leaders, Ethics Frameworks, and Disciplinary Enculturation

   Pinkert, L. ; Beever, J. ; Kuebler, S. ; Taylor, L.E. ; Vazquez, E. ; Milanes, V. ( June 2023 , 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   What responsibility do faculty leaders have to understand the ethics frameworks of their faculty colleagues? To what extent do leaders have capacity to enact that responsibility, given constraints on curricular space, expertise, basic communication skills, and the political climate? The landscape of disciplinary ethics frameworks, or the value content and structured experiences that shape professional development and disciplinary enculturation, reaches wide across the curriculum and deep into the discipline [1][2][3]. This landscape might include frameworks ranging from accrediting bodies and institutional compliance structures to state and national laws and departmental cultures. Coupled to the diversity of specializations within a single discipline, this landscape is richly complex. Yet, faculty leaders play important roles in shaping departmental and programmatic cultures, which are at least partially informed by the disciplinary value landscape. The objective of this paper is to build on previous work [4] to explore this problem of faculty leader responsibility by contrasting faculty leaders’ perspectives on disciplinary values with the values evidenced by their professional organizations. To evidence this contrast, we compare data from interviews with faculty leaders in departments of biology and computer science at a large metropolitan high research intensive HSI-serving university against data scraped from the websites of professional organizations those leaders reference as ethics frameworks. We analyze both sets of data using content analytics methods to examine qualitative and quantitative differences between them. This comparison is part of a larger institutional study looking at this problem across a wide diversity of disciplines [5]. We find an anticipated disparity between identification of the disciplinary frameworks and their content, opening space for discussion about the impact of national ethics frameworks at the local disciplinary level. But we also find an unanticipated diversity of types of ethics frameworks identified by faculty leaders, demonstrating the complexity of just how value frameworks inform disciplinary enculturation through leadership and training. Based on our findings, we articulate the relationship between responsibility and accountability [6] in the process of values-driven disciplinary enculturation. This work is relevant to ethics in that if ethics frameworks and the values they encode play a role in disciplinary enculturation, and there is a disconnect between faculty leaders perceptions of ethics frameworks and their disciplines explicit communications of their values, then the processes and practices of disciplinary enculturation could be more tightly connected to disciplinary values – resulting in more richly ethical professionals. *note: a version of this abstract is also submitted concurrently as a presentation to the Association of Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE), which does not publish abstracts or proceedings papers. [1] Tuana, Nancy. 2013. “Embedding Philosophers in the Practices of Science: Bringing Humanities to the Sciences.” Synthese 190(11): 1955-1973. [2] West, C. and Chur-Hansen, A. (2004). Ethical Enculturation: The Informal and Hidden Ethics Curricula at an Australian Medical School. Focus on Health Professional Education: a Multi-Disciplinary Journal 6(1): 85-99. [3] Nieusma, D. and Cieminski, M. (2018). Ethics Education as Enculturation: Student Learning of Personal, Social, and Professional Responsibility. 2018 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. Paper 23665. [4] Pinkert, L.A., Taylor, L., Beever, J., Kuebler, S.M., Klonoff, E. (2022). Disciplinary Leaders Perceptions of Ethics: An Interview-Based Study of Ethics Frameworks. 2022 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition. https://peer.asee.org/41614. [5] National Science Foundation, “Award Abstract # 2024296 Institutional Transformation: Intersections of Moral Foundations and Ethics Frameworks in STEM Enculturation.” https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2024296, 2020. 

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2. Disciplinary Leaders Perceptions of Ethics: An Interview-Based Study of Ethics Frameworks Paper ID #37843

   Pinkert, LA ; Taylor, L. ; Beever, J. ; Kuebler, SM ; Klonoff, E. ( August 2022 , ASEE 2022)

   Understanding institutional leaders’ perspectives on ethics frameworks can help us better conceptualize where, how, and for whom ethics is made explicit across and within STEM related disciplines and, in turn, to better understand the ways developing professionals are enculturated toward responsibility within their disciplines. As part of an NSF-funded institutional transformation project, our research team conducted interviews with academic leaders about the frameworks of ethics in their home departments, programs, and fields. This paper reports on a series of eleven (11) interviews whose content describes the perspectives of disciplinary leaders from biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics, mechanical and aerospace engineering, optics, philosophy, physics, psychology, STEM education, and writing and rhetoric. Contextualizing frameworks through the participants’ identification of experience, content, and audience allows us to better understand the landscape of ethics practices and procedures that act as the explicit training and education STEM learners receive in their disciplines. If ethics is an important educational focus for engineering, and the work of engineering relies on interdisciplinary connections, then understanding how ethics is taken up both within and across those collaborating disciplines is an important means of supporting ethics in engineering. 

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3. Faculty perspectives on frameworks of responsibility in their disciplines

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ETHICS53270.2021.9632753  

   Beever, Jonathan ; Kuebler, Stephen ; Pinkert, Laurie A. ; Taylor, Lakelyn E. ( October 2021 , 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science and Technology (ETHICS))

   This presentation reports on four interviews with faculty leaders across STEM disciplines at a single institution of higher education. The interviews evidence important overlap and divergence in the perceptions of the roles that disciplinary frameworks play in STEM enculturation. Further, they suggest variance in the perceived nature and scope of ethics across disciplines. The presentation argues that this divergence has implications for institutional cultures of ethics, notions of professional responsibility, and participation in team-based science. 

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4. Learning Trajectories through Undergraduate Engineering Curricula and Experiences

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34905  

   Lande, Micah ( June 2020 , 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   This NSF EAGER research paper investigates how undergraduate STEM and engineering students’ learning trajectories evolve over time, from 1st to senior year, along a novice to expert spectrum. We borrow the idea of “learning trajectories” from mathematics education that can paint the evolution of students’ knowledge and skills over time over a set of learning experiences. Curricula for undergraduate engineering programs can reflect an intended pathway of knowledge construction within a discipline. We intend our study of individual students within undergraduate STEM and engineering programs can highlight how this may happen in situ and how it may be similar or might differ from a given, prescribed programs of study among disciplines. We use a theoretical framework based in adaptive expertise and design thinking adaptive expertise to develop a design learning continuum further. Envisioned routes through disciplinary undergraduate curricula and student conceptions of their design process are explored through qualitative, semi-structured interviews with undergraduate 1st year and senior year students across STEM, engineering and non-STEM field such as computer science, mechanical engineering, general engineering, mathematics, science, English, and art. We also conduct similar interviews with faculty in these fields who are responsible and knowledgeable for undergraduate programs about their perceived benefits for the structure of their program’s curriculum. Additional information is collected from noticing the organizational and pedagogical structures of the relative undergraduate curriculum. Initial findings/outcomes suggest that traditions to knowledge construction both differ across disciplinary approaches and have similarities across non-obvious disciplinary relationships. Faculty have a firm understanding of how one class chains from one to another; students have less of a field of view for how mindful chunks of knowledge combine together. 

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5. Why Engineering Ethics? How Do Educators and Administrators Justify Teaching Engineering Ethics?

   Fatehiboroujeni, S. ; Akera, A. ; Riley, D. ; Cheville, A. ; Karlin, J. ; Appelhans, S. ; De Pree, T. ( January 2019 , ASEE annual conference & exposition)

   This work-in-progress paper presents preliminary findings on how teaching engineering ethics is justified by academic administrators and policymakers, drawing from data collected in a multi-institution collaborative project called “The Distributed System of Governance in Engineering Education”. The project seeks to understand the practice of engineering education reform using data collected from a larger number of oral interviews at a variety of academic institutions and other organizations in engineering education. Investigations of effective strategies for the ethical development of engineering students have been pursued extensively in engineering education research. Canvassing this literature reveals not only diverse approaches and conceptions of engineering ethics, but also a diverse set of rationales and contexts for justifying the development and implementation of engineering ethics coursework and programs. It is also evident that the students’ ethical development is shaped by how the subject is delivered, e.g., the use of case studies or “best practices”, as well as the underlying reasons given to them about why ethics is taught. Institutions send signals to their students, even without intending to, about the importance of engineering ethics to their professional identity through their choice in how and why they address this matter. Our initial analysis of interview data from over a hundred subjects from more than twenty universities demonstrates the diverse ways in which ethics education is justified. The most common reason offered are satisfying ABET accreditation requirements and complying with the recommendations of a disciplinary professional association (e.g., ASME or ASCE). Resistance to notions such as professional judgment, and the absence of any substantial reference to engineering ethics in general conversations about educational decision making and governance are other initial findings from our work. 

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