Abstract
Engineering programs in the United States have been experimenting with diverse pedagogical approaches to educate future professional engineers. However, a crucial dimension of ethics education that focuses on the values, personal commitments, and meaning of engineers has been missing in many of these pedagogical approaches. We argue that a value-based approach to professional ethics education is critically needed in engineering education, because such an approach is indispensable for cultivating self-reflective and socially engaged engineers. This paper starts by briefly comparing two prevalent approaches to ethics education in science and engineering: professional (teaching professional ethical standards, including codes of ethics) and philosophical (teaching ethical theories and their applications in professional settings). While we acknowledge that both approaches help meet certain ethics education objectives, we also argue that neither of these is sufficient to personally engage students in authentic moral learning. We make the case that it is important to connect ethics education to the heart, which is extensively driven by values, and present a value-based approach to professional ethics education. We provide some classroom practices that cultivate a safe, diverse, and engaging learning environment. Finally, we discuss the implications of a value-based approach to professional ethics education for curriculum design and pedagogical practice, including opportunities and challenges for engineering faculty eager to incorporate value-based inquiry into their classrooms.
Highlights
Despite that engineering has consequences for humans and the environment— which largely is the reason humans engage in these activities—engineering usually does not come explicitly with the values or “the moral compass” that guide the wise application of the engineering power
Approaches to engineering ethics education are often instrumentalist, especially when ethics is defined in terms of “ethical skills, competencies, and practical tools”, expected to be applied by engineers to solve professional ethical dilemmas (Zhu and Jesiek 2017)
Assumed to be instrumentalists who are mainly interested in the effectiveness and proficiency of ethical problem-solving
Summary
Virtues and competencies flow through us, whatever the choice, transformative power—life power—is ours as well. Ethics education in engineering in the United States often adopts a professional approach that places a strong emphasis on engineers’ individualistic obligations that prohibit misconduct behaviors and prevent their practices from harming the public (Conlin and Zandvoort 2011) In this view, engineers are portrayed as rational and autonomous humans who “act individually and independently in relation to client[s]” as it is only the professionals who are “able to act based on adequately developed knowledge” One prevalent method is the professional approach, which is often concerned with teaching professional ethical standards and how to contextualize and comply with these standards in professional practices This is the case, for example, when students review and sign an ethics code, a popular extracurricular activity at engineering universities, an activity that often is superficial.
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