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Despite the increase in ethics education offerings of the past few decades, universities struggle to foster desirable ethical dispositions among developing professionals. Part of the reason is that the values implicit in the enculturation of students in higher education cut against the aims of explicit ethics education. To accomplish desirable ethical dispositions among future professionals we ought to broaden our understanding of what the cultivation of ethical professionals entails from a narrow focus on ethics education to a broad focus on ethics enculturation. This paper offers a framework for theorizing ethics enculturation, using examples from recent engineering ethics education literature to demonstrate how the framework captures elements about the development of ethical dispositions and decision-making skills that literature with a narrow focus on ethics education overlooks. 

In this paper, we explore faculty-leader perspectives on “standards,” established statements of expected ethical behavior at disciplinary levels (see page 5), through the analysis of interviews with faculty from the engineering-adjacent disciplines of computer science and biology as an important mechanism to understand the larger ecology of STEM ethics enculturation in which engineers often find themselves. To situate these interviews, we first discuss the existing landscape of literature around faculty roles in shaping the normative values. Then, we report on a set of faculty interviews that investigate the ethics frameworks (and their underlying values) at work in their departments and programs. Specifically, this paper reports a subset of data that is part of a larger NSF-funded research project (award #2024296) exploring the interplay among individual value foundations and disciplinary ethics frameworks in engineering and STEM education. We conclude by analyzing the conceptual and practical distinctions between responsibility and accountability as they relate to the standards identified by the disciplinary faculty we interviewed. 

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.