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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.

We investigate the research question, “How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer‐reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?”

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.

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).

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.

 

The giant ciliate Stentor coeruleus is a classical model system for studying regeneration and morphogenesis in a single cell. The anterior of the cell is marked by an array of cilia, known as the oral apparatus, which can be induced to shed and regenerate in a series of reproducible morphological steps, previously shown to require transcription. If a cell is cut in half, each half regenerates an intact cell. We used RNA sequencing (RNAseq) to assay the dynamic changes in Stentor’s transcriptome during regeneration, after both oral apparatus shedding and bisection, allowing us to identify distinct temporal waves of gene expression including kinases, RNA -binding proteins, centriole biogenesis factors, and orthologs of human ciliopathy genes. By comparing transcriptional profiles of different regeneration events, we identified distinct modules of gene expression corresponding to oral apparatus regeneration, posterior holdfast regeneration, and recovery after wounding. By measuring gene expression after blocking translation, we show that the sequential waves of gene expression involve a cascade mechanism in which later waves of expression are triggered by translation products of early-expressed genes. Among the early-expressed genes, we identified an E2F transcription factor and the RNA-binding protein Pumilio as potential regulators of regeneration based on the expression pattern of their predicted target genes. RNAi-mediated knockdown experiments indicate that Pumilio is required for regenerating oral structures of the correct size. E2F is involved in the completion of regeneration but is dispensable for earlier steps. This work allows us to classify regeneration genes into groups based on their potential role for regeneration in distinct cell regeneration paradigms, and provides insight into how a single cell can coordinate complex morphogenetic pathways to regenerate missing structures. 

This Work-In-Progress paper seeks to continue the development of a framework with which to organize engineering ethics instructional approaches. We build on a recent coding framework that was developed as part of a systematic review of US post-secondary engineering ethics education literature. We apply and iterate on the framework by analyzing the 2016 National Academy of Engineering report, “Infusing Ethics into the Development of Engineers: Exemplary Education Activities and Programs,” which includes two-page synopses of 25 exemplary ethics programs. By applying the framework to these exemplars, we aim to identify prominent instructional approaches utilized across NAE exemplars and the extent to which NAE exemplars’ instructional approaches differ from those identified in the prior systematic review. This WIP has three preliminary outcomes: (1) identification of trends in instructional design approaches across the NAE exemplars, (2) comparison of the instructional design approaches of NAE exemplars with the prior systematic review, and (3) identification of next steps needed to develop a more holistic picture of how ethics is taught in US post-secondary engineering contexts. Example revisions to the coding framework involved combining community-engagement and real-world exposure, broadening micro-insertion to sociotechnical integration, and coding for explicit mentoring components of instruction. A future research step involves further specification of these codes to detail how the NAE exemplars applied select instructional approaches, including heuristics, ethical theories, and case studies, and real-world engagement.