Centering Social Justice and Diverse Voices in Engineering Ethics Curricula

Cortney Holles

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Conference: 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Publication Date: August 23, 2022
Start Date: June 26, 2022
End Date: June 29, 2022
Conference Session: Engineering Ethics Division Poster Session
Page Count: 17
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--41695
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/41695
Download Count: 446

Paper Authors

biography

Cortney Holles Colorado School of Mines

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Cortney Holles is a Teaching Professor in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at Colorado School of Mines where she has taught and developed the required first-year ethics and writing course for STEM majors since 2004. She also teaches science communication and service learning. She defended her educational criticism/action research dissertation on “Faculty-Student Interaction and Impact on Well-Being in Higher Education” and earned her Ed.D in 2021. She is now engaged in the action steps resulting from her study, continuing to interact with faculty and students about their experiences of well-being on college campuses and advocating for reforms that better support students and faculty as whole people. Email cholles@mines.edu or text 303-250-5490 to connect!

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Abstract

This poster presentation highlights a curricular reform effort inspired by anti-racist movements toward social justice in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Engineering ethics curricula is not exempt from the responsibility to address the failures of our systems, and education fields writ large are called to reform now more than ever. The call to reform is answered in part by rethinking the scope of what we teach in engineering ethics and who writes the articles or sparks the thinking in our assignments. Are we making an effort to include the voices of women and people of color? Do we directly address historical injustices in the course of our teaching? This paper and accompanying poster will present the curricular reform efforts of one required professional ethics course for first year engineering and science students. Two main curricular reforms are included here: new lecture and discussion topics explicitly focused on justice, and a database of readings, lectures, and websites created by POC and gender-diverse writers and thinkers. Three new lecture topics were developed for our course in the summer of 2020, guiding students to explore systemic injustice as an integral part of the engineering ethics curriculum, not as a separate topic or unit. In addition to the three new lectures, several existing lectures were updated to include case studies, data, and concepts that connect science, engineering, and technology to social justice issues, with an emphasis on environmental justice. In tandem with the lecture topics, we developed an extensive and growing database of voices from underrepresented groups to supplement or replace the canonical texts of environmental and engineering ethics that are so often those of white males. Assigning Aldo Leopold’s foundational environmental essay “The Land Ethic” alongside N. Scott Momaday’s personal narrative “An American Land Ethic,” for example, allows students to compare indigenous perspectives with mainstream academic perspectives. Our hope with this session is that we can share resources and pedagogy with attendees and collaborate with others to continue to build new curricula and broaden the scope of perspectives in introductory engineering ethics education courses.

Citation
Format

Holles, C. (2022, August), Centering Social Justice and Diverse Voices in Engineering Ethics Curricula Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--41695

TY - CPAPER
AB - This poster presentation highlights a curricular reform effort inspired by anti-racist movements toward social justice in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. Engineering ethics curricula is not exempt from the responsibility to address the failures of our systems, and education fields writ large are called to reform now more than ever. The call to reform is answered in part by rethinking the scope of what we teach in engineering ethics and who writes the articles or sparks the thinking in our assignments. Are we making an effort to include the voices of women and people of color? Do we directly address historical injustices in the course of our teaching?

This paper and accompanying poster will present the curricular reform efforts of one required professional ethics course for first year engineering and science students. Two main curricular reforms are included here: new lecture and discussion topics explicitly focused on justice, and a database of readings, lectures, and websites created by POC and gender-diverse writers and thinkers. Three new lecture topics were developed for our course in the summer of 2020, guiding students to explore systemic injustice as an integral part of the engineering ethics curriculum, not as a separate topic or unit. In addition to the three new lectures, several existing lectures were updated to include case studies, data, and concepts that connect science, engineering, and technology to social justice issues, with an emphasis on environmental justice. In tandem with the lecture topics, we developed an extensive and growing database of voices from underrepresented groups to supplement or replace the canonical texts of environmental and engineering ethics that are so often those of white males. Assigning Aldo Leopold’s foundational environmental essay “The Land Ethic” alongside N. Scott Momaday’s personal narrative “An American Land Ethic,” for example, allows students to compare indigenous perspectives with mainstream academic perspectives.

Our hope with this session is that we can share resources and pedagogy with attendees and collaborate with others to continue to build new curricula and broaden the scope of perspectives in introductory engineering ethics education courses.
AU - Cortney Holles
CY - Minneapolis, MN
DA - 2022/08/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Centering Social Justice and Diverse Voices in Engineering Ethics Curricula
UR - https://peer.asee.org/41695
DO - 10.18260/1-2--41695
ER -