and establishing their careersas well, it is a valuable timeframe to investigate [1] [2] [3]. During this period, we can betterunderstand how engineering students’ personal and social identities, which are their conceptionsof themselves as individuals and group members, engineering identities, which is theirconceptions of themselves as engineers, and ethical identities, which is their conception ofthemselves as people who identify with their professional ethics, develop. Reviewing these threeidentity types is valuable in identifying both their pre-established impacts on career choice andaspirations as well as the remaining gaps in literature that need to be filled such as the connectionbetween moral behavior and vocational choice [3] [4] [5
. Aaron W. Johnson, University of Michigan Aaron W. Johnson (he/him) is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department and a Core Faculty member of the Engineering Education Research Program at the University of Michigan. His lab’s design-based research focuses on how to re-contextualize engineering science engineering courses to better reflect and prepare students for the reality of ill-defined, sociotechnical engineering practice. Their current projects include studying and designing classroom interventions around macroethical issues in aerospace engineering and the productive beginnings of engineering judgment as students create and use mathematical models. Aaron holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering
computational power is greatly expanding its impactand influence in leadership, i.e., data, and computation on it, is used to enhance the practice ofleadership. These developments have wide-ranging impacts for organization and will force us toaddress thorny ethical challenges.This work will address a small slice of the overall picture, i.e., an initial exploration in the Fall 2023semester of student and industry perceptions about specific ethical questions on Gen AI’s impact oncareers and the workplace. The intent is to help students in our undergraduate Engineering Leadershipclass at Texas A&M University to be resilient in their own careers and to navigate the ethical watersof Gen AI in decision making in their workplaces.We use a flipped
undergraduatecomputing students worked in teams to sketch and create ethics based decision making scenariosusing paper or blackboard. This scenario creation activity model was later refined and employedin different Ethics in Engineering courses as a means to increase engagement through gameplayand role playing.In 2022, this work was expanded by joining forces with engineering faculty from the Virtues andVocations initiative and the Ethics at Work project which included other computing faculty,faculty from Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and faculty from Philosophy, where thegoal was to capture an engineering wide faculty and undergraduate student sentiment about ethicscontent in engineering. A multidisciplinary team of undergraduates, led by advising
dimensions of their work and to be ethical actors. While one approach to the ethicseducation of engineers involves separate courses in philosophy of ethical decision making, wecontend a better way to teach ethics to first-year engineering students might be to situate it in theeveryday decisions of engineers as they do their work in realistic scenarios while considering thepersonal and social consequences of their decisions by role-playing.Richly contextualized cases have been used to supplement the more purely philosophicalapproaches to engineering ethics education, but are often presented as third-person narrativesrather than as active first-person role-playing scenarios. Educational games have been shown tobe an effective teaching tool for complex
. ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2023Character Development in the Engineering Classroom: An Exploratory, Mixed-Methods Investigation of Student PerspectivesI. IntroductionEthics education is an undisputedly essential part of engineering education. Society, industry,universities, and accreditation demand that engineering students be better educated to handle themany ethical situations that professional practice will require of our graduates. Whileengineering educators continue to explore how to most effectively prepare students for complexand nuanced ethical decision-making in their professional careers [1] – [8], traditionalapproaches to engineering ethics education have been largely limited to ethical reasoning guidedby
their own decisions or courses of action(i.e., where the stakes and tradeoffs are real to the learner). As one author describes it, theseapproaches “[allow] students to draw on their own experiences…to create a focal point andmeaning around abstract ethical concepts” [19, p. 1390].While the literature on experiential learning in engineering ethics has grown substantially inrecent years, extensions of this strategy into the realm of engineering leadership education iscomparatively rarer in published research. Our development of The Mystery Lab, therefore,leverages an opportunity to explore how the strengths of an experiential approach to ethicsinstruction can be applied not just to personal decision making, but to the collective behaviors
forindividual engineers to prepare for their professional careers. The approachable writing style andreflective nature of the content make this text ideal for any level of engineering student, but it isparticularly salient for first- or second-year students.Giving Voice to Values (GVV)The GVV curriculum was pioneered by Mary Gentile, former professor with the University ofVirginia School of Business, for application in business. GVV takes an “action-orientedapproach” to values-driven leadership.11 We selected GVV for the Engineering Ethics coursebecause many graduating engineering students will one day step into leadership roles in businessorganizations. A significant body of GVV content is delivered by Gentile as pre-recordedmodules, developed for a
themresponsible for learning as a group, as based on Vygotsky’s theory of social constructivism [7].In capstone learning, student agency supports the ability to make decisions during design,especially during problem framing [8]. Agency is also essential for students in defining andmaking meaning of their personal identities, experiences, and narratives as engineers [9].Therefore, we examine the role of agency Student-led discussions have value for collaborativelearning and reflection of ethics. In a systematic review of peer teaching in healthcare education,both direct and indirect peer-based teaching methods were identified including student-ledlectures, feedback, and problem-based learning [10]. However, few studies have focused on peerlearning as an
engineering students’ competencies for responding to ethical predicaments.SEAF draws on both conflict resolution process design methods and on elements of layeringderived from the Empowered Self Defense pedagogy. It introduces additional scenario-buildingand response-planning strategies that can enhance the stepwise rehearsal experience of thelearner, and therefore their sense of self-efficacy in applying the GVV framework. The proposedinnovation incorporates two additional elements: concentric circles of engagement and stepwiserehearsal of interactions. Concentric circles of engagement involve different centers of focus anddegrees of involvement of others in the learner’s process of ethical decision-making and action,which expand from an internal
approaches include exploring the connection between personal values,personal story, and principles (or personal ethics) and students’ behaviors that can affectpsychological safety on teams.IntroductionWithin this work we examine ethics as the collection of principles that we use to motivate us andhelp us make decisions and guide our interactions with those around us and work that we do.Therefore, our ethic is made up of the principles that motivate, inform, and guide our daily lives.From this standpoint, the discussion on ethics development should extend beyond why theChallenger exploded or the causes behind the Hyatt Regency Bridge failure.If we apply the four domains of Leadership Model [1], the development of a leadership ethic notonly includes
education institutions have the practicalrequirement to include ethics education to maintain ABET accreditation for engineeringprograms [7]. Ideally, students are equipped to consider ethical dilemmas from the microethics ofindividual ethics decisions to the macroethics of policy implications on an organization andsociety as a whole, and students should understand how microethics and macroethics areconnected [4], [8], [9]. Graduates should not only be equipped to behave ethically as professionalengineers in their individual practice as an engineer but also be equipped to understand broaderethical complexities that could arise as a corporate manager or executive, a research director, orany other local, national, or global position of leadership.An
professionals avoid difficult yet necessary conversations, but this is a hugedisservice to their career growth. In this module we build on the effective and proven strategiesto having difficult, awkward, but crucial conversations within the ecosystem, whether that is toadvocate for an idea, to ask for resources or support, to clear up a misunderstanding, to buildtrust with peers or management or other similar scenarios. A sample scenario used in thistraining session is below. This scenario enables students to personalize their conversations, tobuild rapport and connect deeper with others rather than just mechanically go through themotions of conversation.Sample Scenario: We explored a sticky/awkward scenario where the engineer is the technicallead and
on well-known engineering failuresand crises, such as the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Ford Pinto fuel tank issue, and theHyatt Regency Hotel walkway collapse. Although intended as an improvement over the theorytheory-based approach because it seems to provide students with tools and procedures, they canuse to work through moral decisions they may face in their careers [7], this approach still hasseveral limitations. Firstly, many of the cases used are several decades old, potentially leadingstudents to view them as irrelevant to modern engineering challenges [2]. Additionally, thesenarratives often present key figures as heroic whistleblowers rather than portraying them asregular engineers who are simply fulfilling their