Conference Session

Beyond Individual Ethics: Engineering in Context

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Donna Riley, Smith College

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

resonated personally and enabled them to connect an outside interestwith ethical principles and methods of analysis they learned in the class. This item met courseobjectives related to critical thinking and acting reflectively in the world.Table 2: Student topics for action essays (left) and resultant actions (right)Should the college’s design clinic accept projects from Interviews with and recommendations to Designdefense contractors who place restrictions on the Clinic and Program Directors; personal decisionparticipation of international students? about participating in project when fellow team member was excludedHow should the town community

Conference Session

Beyond Individual Ethics: Engineering in Context

Collection

2008 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Dean Nieusma, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

approaches. The PDI program entails a set ofinterdisciplinary, undergraduate courses and degree options that span engineering, the humanitiesand social sciences (H&SS), design disciplines, and management. Initiated in the mid-1990s,PDI was motivated primarily by the desires 1) to combine the strengths of various disciplinaryapproaches to social problem solving and 2) to revamp undergraduate engineering curricula byincluding systematic analysis of the social context of engineering problems. By beingintegrative, interdisciplinary, and systematically attentive to the social context of engineeringwork, PDI addresses fundamental shortcomings in the H&SS-electives model of traditional

Conference Session

Questions of Identity

Collection

2006 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

David Ollis, North Carolina State University

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

the top floor, descending onefloor in each operation of formulation, blending, packaging, and shipping. An MS degreewas followed by an industry year operating small scale refinery processes, and learningcomputer programming. Page 11.1227.5 Along the undergraduate way I certainly took and survived many classes, thoughin retrospect I probably regarded most more as obstacles rather than enlightenments onmy path to engineering. My deepest learning and sense of confidence for “how stuffworks” arose largely from the easily remembered summer activities vs. the now veryhazy course topics of academia. “Hands-on” was clearly the best path for

Conference Session

Normative Commitments and Public Engagement in Engineering

Collection

2010 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Gary Downey, Virginia Tech

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

importanceof having personal and work identities that challenge one another, keeping both stimulated andvibrant. A career commitment to service led to work on international standards, where herealized that participants tended to assume deployment in the developed or near-developedworld, without much thought of the possibility that not all technology is appropriate for thedeveloping world. Asserting that the goal of the engineering profession is to actually help people,Dan asserts that an expansive life insures expansive work by forcing a focus on broader impact.3. Expanding the practitioner to fit the person-Margaret Pinnell More importantly, when I was asked to manage programs developing war-related materials I also found my job to be in

Conference Session

Approaches to Learning Outcomes Assessment in Liberal Education

Collection

2007 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Kyle Oliver, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Traci Nathans-Kelly; Sandra Courter, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Laura Grossenbacher, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Tagged Divisions

Liberal Education

makes these lessons adaptable to other sets of institutionalcircumstances.The early evolution of the course (spring 2005)In the spring of 2005, a seminar-style class grew out of necessity, circumstance, and a desire tohave a reading and discussion course in the Technical Communication Certificate (TCC)program housed in our College of Engineering’s Engineering Professional DevelopmentDepartment. An unanticipated and significant shift in our TCC staff that semester demanded thata handful of students, all registered for independent study credits, meet as one class. At the sametime, one of this paper’s coauthors (Kyle Oliver, then an undergraduate nuclear engineeringstudent) approached our TCC director (Laura Grossenbacher, another coauthor) about