Navigating the Mystery: An Approach for Integrating Experiential Learning in Ethics into an Engineering Leadership Program

James N. Magarian; John M. Feiler; Leo McGonagle; Eileen Milligan; Alexander Rokosz; Elizabeth Schanne; Reza S. Rahaman; Olivier Ladislas de Weck

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Engineering, Ethics, and Leadership
Tagged Divisions: Engineering Leadership Development Division (LEAD) and Engineering Ethics Division (ETHICS)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/47797

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Paper Authors

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James N. Magarian Massachusetts Institute of Technology orcid.org/0000-0003-3364-2213

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James Magarian is a Sr. Lecturer with the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership (GEL) Program. He joined MIT and GEL after nearly a decade in industry as a mechanical engineer and engineering manager in aerospace/defense. His research focuses on engineering workforce formation and the education-careers transition.

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John M. Feiler Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Leo McGonagle Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Leo McGonagle helped conceive and design the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program (GEL) and was named executive director as the program launched in 2008. He helped oversee the program’s growth from MIT start-up with twenty students to a well-established School of Engineering program with over 150 students participating annually, recognized nationally and internationally as a model for effective engineering leadership education. Leo brought the concept for the innovative Engineering Leadership Lab (ELL) to GEL, having overseen similar experiential teamwork and leadership development courses elsewhere. He has instructed this highly rated course each year.
Leo’s passion is developing leaders. Before joining GEL, he served the nation in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, achieving the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Among successive organizational leadership positions of increasing responsibility, Leo spent six-years on elite-school college campuses, overseeing leader development programs while coaching, advising, and mentoring emerging-leader students. As department chair of the Army Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) Program at MIT, he was responsible for the leadership development and commissioning of students from MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Wellesley, Gordon, Salem State and Endicott College. He previously served in a leader and character development role at The United States Military Academy at West Point.

Leo led soldiers during the Persian Gulf conflict, in support of the Global War on Terrorism in Iraq, and during peace enforcement operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was awarded three Bronze Star Medals for leadership and service during wartime operations. He earned his commission through ROTC and was a Distinguished Military Graduate, He is a graduate of the U.S. Army Ranger School and the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He earned a M.S. in leadership development and counseling from Long Island University and a B.A. in psychology from Boston University. He is a member of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). Leo is an avid hiker, and when not at work can usually be found on a New Hampshire White Mountains high-peak.

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Reza S. Rahaman Massachusetts Institute of Technology orcid.org/0000-0003-1184-0446

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Dr. Rahaman returned to MIT in 2018 after a 29 year career in the Consumer Packaged Goods, Pharmaceuticals, and Agricultural Chemical Industries to lead the four School of Engineering Technical Leadership and Communication (TLC) Programs – the Gordon-MIT Program in Engineering Leadership (GEL), the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP), the Graduate Engineering Leadership Program (GradEL), and the School of Engineering Communication Lab.

Immediately prior to MIT, Reza was the Vice-president of Research, Development, and Innovation for the Specialty Division of the Clorox Company. In that role he was accountable for developing innovation strategies for a diverse set of businesses and ensuring robust technology roadmaps and innovation pipelines to deliver growth and profit targets for 45% of the Clorox Company portfolio ($2.7bn in net customer sales). Among his businesses were Brita, Burt’s Bees, Glad, Hidden Valley Ranch, Fresh Step, and Kingsford Charcoal.

In addition to his passion for developing leaders, Reza is passionate about workplace equality. He was the Executive Sponsor of the Clorox Pride Employee Resource group, and was a member of the Board of Directors of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, the world’s premier nonprofit promoting LGBT+ workplace equality from 2016-2021. He currently serves as a Board Ambassador. He and his husband James enjoy travel and hiking

Reza received his BSc.(Eng.) in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London, and his MSCEP in Chemical Engineering Practice and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT.

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Olivier Ladislas de Weck Massachusetts Institute of Technology orcid.org/0000-0001-6677-383X

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Olivier de Weck is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT. His research focuses on the technological evolution of complex systems over time, both on Earth and in Space . He is a Fellow of INCOSE and AIAA and served as Faculty Co-Director of the MIT Gordon Engineering Leadership Program.

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Abstract

This Practice Paper describes an approach for integrating ethics experiential learning into an Engineering Leadership (EL) program. We discuss motivations for EL programs’ continued efforts at incorporating and enhancing ethics learning; for instance, to strengthen students’ sense of connection between ethics and day-to-day engineering work, to grow their abilities to recognize decisions with ethical implications, and to build their awareness of how ethical lapses can transpire in team settings. We review experiential learning as a means of facilitating development in these areas through activities that immerse student teams into unfamiliar dilemmas requiring ethical reasoning. Further, we describe key challenges of operationalizing experiential learning in ethics, such as incorporating realism and unpredictability, prompting the critical thinking necessary for recognition of ethical dilemmas, and creating a learning context that does not feel contrived or exaggerated. We then present designs of a class session and an associated team-based experiential “engineering leadership lab” (ELL) recently developed at the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL). Focusing on the ELL, we discuss how this activity was structured to address aims and challenges; for instance, by embedding an ethical dilemma into a product development scenario requiring decision making under schedule and financial pressures in a realistic organizational environment. We share team-level performance observations from a recent instance of the activity; here, all 23 teams composing the program’s first-year cohort participated. We observed that team performance varied across a range of outcome categories: those that submitted the activity’s deliverables while failing to navigate its ethical dimensions, those that contributed deliverables reflecting a partial recognition or incomplete handling of ethical dimensions, and those that submitted deliverables reflecting thorough navigation of ethical dimensions. These performance observations were possible because the activity involved making resource choices linked to ethical implications, resulting in certain materials’ use (or absence) evident in teams’ physical deliverables. Students’ post-activity reflections, submitted after they participated in an activity debrief, included indications of intended learning in a majority of cases (83% of submittals) based upon a rubric. Drawing from activity observations and reflections, we discuss how teams’ ethical decision making appears to have been strained by various intended pressures intrinsic to the activity (e.g., time and resource constraints, a competitive context, and costs), yet, that many students’ reflections contained ideas for mitigating such pressures through enhanced critical thinking and team collaboration. Though program-level evaluation of ethics learning is ongoing, we conclude by sharing lessons-learned from this module’s development, identifying implementation considerations for other programs wishing to explore similar forms of ethics experiential learning.

Citation
Format

Magarian, J. N., & Feiler, J. M., & McGonagle, L., & Milligan, E., & Rokosz, A., & Schanne, E., & Rahaman, R. S., & de Weck, O. L. (2024, June), Navigating the Mystery: An Approach for Integrating Experiential Learning in Ethics into an Engineering Leadership Program Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/47797

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - This Practice Paper describes an approach for integrating ethics experiential learning into an Engineering Leadership (EL) program. We discuss motivations for EL programs’ continued efforts at incorporating and enhancing ethics learning; for instance, to strengthen students’ sense of connection between ethics and day-to-day engineering work, to grow their abilities to recognize decisions with ethical implications, and to build their awareness of how ethical lapses can transpire in team settings. We review experiential learning as a means of facilitating development in these areas through activities that immerse student teams into unfamiliar dilemmas requiring ethical reasoning. Further, we describe key challenges of operationalizing experiential learning in ethics, such as incorporating realism and unpredictability, prompting the critical thinking necessary for recognition of ethical dilemmas, and creating a learning context that does not feel contrived or exaggerated. We then present designs of a class session and an associated team-based experiential “engineering leadership lab” (ELL) recently developed at the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL). Focusing on the ELL, we discuss how this activity was structured to address aims and challenges; for instance, by embedding an ethical dilemma into a product development scenario requiring decision making under schedule and financial pressures in a realistic organizational environment. We share team-level performance observations from a recent instance of the activity; here, all 23 teams composing the program’s first-year cohort participated. We observed that team performance varied across a range of outcome categories: those that submitted the activity’s deliverables while failing to navigate its ethical dimensions, those that contributed deliverables reflecting a partial recognition or incomplete handling of ethical dimensions, and those that submitted deliverables reflecting thorough navigation of ethical dimensions. These performance observations were possible because the activity involved making resource choices linked to ethical implications, resulting in certain materials’ use (or absence) evident in teams’ physical deliverables. Students’ post-activity reflections, submitted after they participated in an activity debrief, included indications of intended learning in a majority of cases (83% of submittals) based upon a rubric. Drawing from activity observations and reflections, we discuss how teams’ ethical decision making appears to have been strained by various intended pressures intrinsic to the activity (e.g., time and resource constraints, a competitive context, and costs), yet, that many students’ reflections contained ideas for mitigating such pressures through enhanced critical thinking and team collaboration. Though program-level evaluation of ethics learning is ongoing, we conclude by sharing lessons-learned from this module’s development, identifying implementation considerations for other programs wishing to explore similar forms of ethics experiential learning.
AU  - James N. Magarian
AU  - John M. Feiler
AU  - Leo McGonagle
AU  - Eileen Milligan
AU  - Alexander Rokosz
AU  - Elizabeth Schanne
AU  - Reza S. Rahaman
AU  - Olivier Ladislas de Weck
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Navigating the Mystery: An Approach for Integrating Experiential Learning in Ethics into an Engineering Leadership Program
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/47797
ER  -