Using Student Engagement to Relocate Ethics to the Core of the Engineering Curriculum

One of the core problems with engineering ethics education is perceptual. Although ethics is meant to be a central component of today’s engineering curriculum, it is often perceived as a marginal requirement that must be fulfilled. In addition, there is a mismatch between faculty and student percept...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Science and engineering ethics 2019-12, Vol.25 (6), p.1771-1788
Main Author: Sunderland, Mary E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bioethics
Biological & chemical weapons
Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering
Curricula
Cybersecurity
Data encryption
Education
Engineering
Engineering education
Ethics
Medicine/Public Health
Network security
Original Paper
Philosophy
Philosophy of Science
Students
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Summary:One of the core problems with engineering ethics education is perceptual. Although ethics is meant to be a central component of today’s engineering curriculum, it is often perceived as a marginal requirement that must be fulfilled. In addition, there is a mismatch between faculty and student perceptions of ethics. While faculty aim to communicate the nuances and complexity of engineering ethics, students perceive ethics as laws, rules, and codes that must be memorized. This paper provides some historical context to better understand these perceptual differences, and suggests that curriculum constraints are important contributing factors. Drawing on the growing scholarship of student engagement approaches to pedagogy, the paper explores how students can be empowered to effect change in the broader engineering curriculum through engineering ethics. The paper describes a student engagement approach to pedagogy that includes students as active participants in curriculum design—a role that enables them to critically reflect about why ethics is a requirement. Including students in the process of curriculum design leads students to reframe ethics as an integrative tool with the capacity to bring together different engineering departments and build bridges to non-engineering fields. This paper argues that students can and should play an active and important role in relocating ethics from the periphery to the core of the engineering curriculum.
ISSN:1353-3452
1471-5546
DOI:10.1007/s11948-013-9444-5