Overcoming Challenges to Infusing Ethics into the Development of Engineers Proceedings of a Workshop (2017) / Chapter Skim
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The Challenges
The Challenges
Pages 7-16
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From page 7... ...
Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food, and Community Ethics at Michigan State University, addressed the need to make engineering ethics relevant to students both during their education and throughout their careers. Erin Cech, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, opened the panel discussion by highlighting the importance of ethical engage ent for professional engineers and identified the responsibility for m ethical engagement and concern for social well-being as rooted in what she described as "engineering's social and legal monopoly on an entire area of life." She made the case that because formal engineering education may be the only institutionalized training where future engineers learn ethics and the responsibilities of their profession, it is crucial to ensure that engineering programs instill in students a concern for ethics and public welfare.
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From page 8... ...
According to Cech, the results suggest "a culture of disengagement, a constellation of beliefs, meanings, and practices that frame ethical and public welfare concerns as tangential to ‘real' engineering." This culture, she said, has consequences for what it means to "think like an engineer," in determining what counts as legitimate or important information when defining and solving engineering problems, and what successful engineering actually looks like. She identified three concepts underlying the culture of disengagement: (1)
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From page 9... ...
The group proposed recognizing that practitioners and educators communicate engineering culture and mindset, even in technical courses; revising language used in classroom, office, and external communications; avoiding negative stereotypes of engineers; giving specific examples of ways that engineers contribute to society; practicing and encouraging epistemic humility (willingness to acknowledge one's ignorance or limitations of knowledge) ; portraying ethical engineering work as "doing more good in the world"; and recognizing that ethics are always part of good engineering practice.
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From page 10... ...
The checklist includes six categories of assessment, including Listen Contextually, Identify Structural Conditions, Acknowledge Political Agency, Increase Opportunities and Available Resources, Reduce Risk to Users/Community, and Increase Human Capabilities. Yet despite very positive initial student reactions, "the vast majority of students explicitly avoided using the checklist in its entirety." Others used only one or two tools from the checklist in developing their projects, rather than the entire checklist.
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From page 11... ...
ASCE is the largest professional society for civil engineers, with approximately 150,000 members; only about 28,900 of them are under the age of 30 and about 23,700 are students. ASCE provides ethics webinars and presentations, hosts ethics publications (including a monthly column of professional ethics case studies)
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From page 12... ...
According to him, "An overcrowded engineering curriculum makes separate, standalone engineering ethics courses difficult; Moreover individual ethics courses risk marginalization, while modules within existing courses risk dilution and necessitate negotiation with faculty peers and other institutional constituencies. There is low faculty knowledge, comfort, and facility with teaching ethics.
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From page 13... ...
Faculty members design new ethics instruction and assessment tools, he said, and ultimately share their designs and assessments and receive feedback from other participants. Litzinger described these workshops as very positive, and noted that faculty outcomes varied: "we have seen faculty adopt the slides that our philosophy colleague use, talk to their students about them, have the students use moral theories and others who are not comfortable with that and choose to use the codes of ethics as a way to instruct their students." Larry Shuman recognized many of the barriers to building faculty capacity for teaching ethics: a lack of competent, qualified instructors; variations in pedagogy and cultural circumstance; large class sizes; faculty and administrator buy-in, especially at the department chair level; assessment and evaluation.
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From page 14... ...
Institutional Change Jaime Lester, associate professor of higher education at George Mason University, described her experience and expertise in organizational changes in higher education institutions and proposed that interdisciplinary collaborations might be key to organizational change in academic settings. Observing that "change happens on multiple levels of a higher education institution, and often it can and does occur on the local level," she presented a model of organizational diffusion, the notion that "individuals who have a passion or an interest who undergo some form of training -- innovators or change agents -- diffuse their knowledge and interest through an organization." Lester noted that much of the focus of traditional efforts at institutional change is often misdirected at policy change, "but rarely do we talk about what happens in terms of the relational pieces."
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From page 15... ...
" Lester agreed that the barriers to faculty pedagogy changes extend beyond policy and institutional barriers to include individual barriers (i.e., teaching socialization, time, competing priorities, an increase in contingent faculty) and interorganizational barriers (i.e., accreditation standards and disciplinary norms)
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