Abstract
AbstractBackgroundEngineering education must prepare students to assume professional and ethical responsibility for the societal impacts of technology, but most engineering students do not receive adequate ethics teaching. In fact, engineering education has been described as characterized by a “culture of disengagement” in which ethical and societal concerns are constructed as different from and less important than purely technical concerns.Purpose/HypothesisThis study explores how a culture of disengagement is discursively constructed and perpetuated in engineering education by analyzing the discursive construction of ethics and ethical reflection in an introductory engineering course in Sweden.Design/MethodThe study is based on extensive ethnographic data in the form of field notes, lecture recordings, interview data, and course documents. The data are analyzed using a discourse analytic approach rooted in discourse theory.ResultsThe results illustrate five processes through which ethics and ethical reflection are articulated as not the responsibility of the specific field of engineering, irrelevant for the profession, of low quality and status, and not very important for the engineering degree.ConclusionsThe results contribute to understanding how a culture of disengagement may be perpetuated in engineering education. The results also point toward pedagogical tools and strategies that instructors and program managers can use to construct ethics and ethical reflection as an advanced skill that is an important and integral part of engineering and engineering education—and thus better prepare future engineers to become responsible professionals.
Highlights
In the engineering education literature, the concept of ethics has been described as consisting of three dimensions: 1. “ordinary morality”, which refers to standards of conduct that apply to everybody, such as “don’t kill”; 2. “moral theory”, i.e. a philosophical discipline; and 3. professional ethics that only apply to members of certain groups (Davis, 2006)
I have chosen three articulatory themes that are relevant for addressing the aim of the research, i.e. to explore how the concepts of ethics and ethical reflection are discursively constructed in an introductory engineering course in Sweden
Based on a discourse analysis of ethnographic data, I have argued that the core subject area of the engineering program is articulated as advanced and of high quality, while anything that is not the core subject area is articulated as of inferior quality, lower status, not learnable, and not very important
Summary
In the engineering education literature, the concept of ethics has been described as consisting of three dimensions: 1. “ordinary morality”, which refers to standards of conduct that apply to everybody, such as “don’t kill”; 2. “moral theory”, i.e. a philosophical discipline; and 3. professional ethics that only apply to members of certain groups (e.g. engineering ethics, which apply to engineers “and no one else”) (Davis, 2006). Based on a systematic review of the literature on ethics interventions in US engineering education, Hess and Fore (2018) identified three types of learning goals for ethical development: ethical sensitivity/awareness, ethical judgment/decision-making, and ethical commitment/confidence. Drawing on Cech’s description of the culture of disengagement in engineering education, I argue that ethical awareness and commitment are, at least to some degree, learned through socialization processes in engineering education:. 1) define discourse as “a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world).” They further state that discourse analysis, like all other social constructionist approaches to research, is based on a relativist epistemology according to which we do not have direct access to reality.
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