Macroethical development in civil engineering education

Abstract

This short research paper presents the early stage of an ongoing project in engineering ethics education. Given the impact of civil and architectural engineering and the profession’s obligation to uphold public welfare and trust, students must understand macroethics, engineering’s responsibilities to the human, natural, and built environment. The Bachelor’s curriculum plays a key role in developing ethical responsibility, as a site of professional socialization and the only institutionalized training most engineers receive. Students are also exposed to ethics, values, and the societal impacts of engineering via informal learning before and during their university experience. The present project is designed to explore how civil and architectural engineering students make meaning of their societal responsibilities by examining their conceptualisation of the impact of engineering and the factors that influenced it. This study employs a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) approach and draws on interviews with Bachelor’s civil and architectural engineering students in Belgium and the United Kingdom. Data collection and analysis are ongoing simultaneously with the aim of generating a novel theoretical model of macroethical development. This short paper introduces the theoretical and methodological approach of the study, anticipated outcomes, and next steps.