Ethical Tech Pedagogy for Public Good: A Review of Educational Initiatives and Approaches

Abstract

Our research team is conducting a scoping literature review of scholarly and popular publications that address the role of ethics and ethical thinking in relation to engineering education curriculum, professional engineering practices more broadly, and their integration in the tech sector at large. This paper reports on the preliminary results of that review, which so far covers current approaches (i.e. from the last ten years) to cultivating and scaling these principles in academia and industry, and also examines local initiatives that implement some of these ideas in the classroom. We (a) identify recent knowledge and gaps on effective approaches to embedding ethics in engineering curriculum, including pedagogies that mobilize novel collaborative instruments and technologies for engaging the public; and (b) describe current academic approaches to centering ethics and ethical thinking as core elements of training and professional practice at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada). In keeping with the 2021 ISTAS “Public Interest Technology” theme, the paper emphasizes efforts underway to train professional and aspiring engineers in North America with the integrated critical thinking skills they need to ethically assess the social and cultural impacts of the technologies they design, develop, and deploy.