Critical Approaches to CSR as a Strategy to Broaden Engineering Students’ Views of Stakeholders
- Conference
- Location
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Tampa, Florida
- Publication Date
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June 15, 2019
- Start Date
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June 15, 2019
- End Date
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June 19, 2019
- Conference Session
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Engineering Ethics Division Technical Session - Ethics in the Engineering Curriculum
- Tagged Division
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Engineering Ethics
- Page Count
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17
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--32567
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/32567
- Download Count
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694
Paper Authors
Jessica Mary Smith Colorado School of Mines
Jessica M. Smith is Associate Professor in the Engineering, Design & Society Division at the Colorado School of Mines and Co-Director of Humanitarian Engineering. She is an anthropologist with two major research areas: 1) the sociocultural dynamics of extractive and energy industries, with a focus on corporate social responsibility, social justice, labor, and gender and 2) engineering education, with a focus on socioeconomic class and social responsibility. She is the author of Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (Rutgers University Press, 2014), which was funded by the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2016 the National Academy of Engineering recognized her Corporate Social Responsibility course as a national exemplar in teaching engineering ethics. Professor Smith holds a PhD in Anthropology and a certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan and bachelor’s degrees in International Studies, Anthropology and Latin American Studies from Macalester College.
Greg Rulifson P.E.
Colorado School of Mines
orcid.org/0000-0002-7691-2247
Greg currently teaches in Humanitarian Engineering at CSM. Greg earned his bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice from UC Berkeley where he acquired a passion for using engineering to facilitate developing communities’ capacity for success. He earned his master's degree in Structural Engineering and Risk Analysis from Stanford University. His PhD work at CU Boulder focused on how student's connections of social responsibility and engineering change throughout college as well as how engineering service is valued in employment and supported in the workplace.
Cassidy Laurel Grady Colorado School of Mines
Cassidy is currently a junior attending Colorado School of Mines. She is majoring in Geological Engineering and minoring in Engineering for Community Development. Cassidy is interested in working with vulnerable communities on participatory methods of geological risk mitigation and conservation of groundwater.
Nicole M. Smith Colorado School of Mines
Dr. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Mining Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines. She is a cultural anthropologist with research and teaching interests in livelihoods and extractive industries, corporate social responsibility, indigenous peoples, artisanal and small-scale mining, and engineering education.
Linda A. Battalora Colorado School of Mines
Linda A. Battalora is a Teaching Professor in the Petroleum Engineering Department, a Payne Institute for Earth Resources Fellow, and a Shultz Humanitarian Engineering Fellow at the Colorado School of Mines (Mines). She holds BS and MS degrees in Petroleum Engineering from Mines, a JD from Loyola University New Orleans School of Law, and a PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering from Mines. Prior to joining the Faculty at Mines, Linda served in various roles in the oil and gas industry including operations engineer, production engineer, attorney, and international negotiator for oil and gas project development. She teaches Properties of Reservoir Fluids, Petroleum Seminar, Field Session, Fossil Energy, Environmental Law and Sustainability, and Corporate Social Responsibility. In addition to teaching in the Petroleum Engineering program at Mines, Linda teaches courses in the Leadership in Social Responsibility, Humanitarian Engineering, Energy minor programs and the Natural Resources and Energy Policy graduate program at Mines. Linda is an active member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Health, Safety, Security, Environment and Social Responsibility (HSSE-SR) Advisory Committee and is Chair of the Sustainable Development Technical Section. She is also a member of multiple professional organizations including the American Society for Engineering Education, Association of International Petroleum Negotiators, American Inns of Court, American Bar Association, and the Colorado Bar Association. Her research areas include HSSE-SR, Sustainable Development, and the Circular Economy. She is a recipient of the 2018 SPE Distinguished Member Award, 2015 SPE Rocky Mountain North America Region Award for distinguished achievement by Petroleum Engineering Faculty award recipient, and the 2014 Rocky Mountain North America Region Award for distinguished contribution to Petroleum Engineering in Health, Safety, Security, Environment and Social Responsibility award recipient. She is also a SPE Distinguished Lecturer (2019-2020).
Emily Sarver Virginia Tech
Emily Sarver is an Associate Professor of mining engineering, and adjunct faculty to civil and environmental engineering, at Virginia Tech. Her teaching and research interests center on responsible resource production, occupational health, and mine environmental monitoring. Dr. Sarver teaches about sustainable development principles and practices for mineral and energy resource projects at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Carrie J. McClelland P.E. Colorado School of Mines
Carrie J McClelland is an Associate Teaching Professor at Colorado School of Mines. Carrie is a registered professional engineer with a passion for teaching the next generation of engineers to be well-rounded professionals who consider the technical aspects and the broader effects of their work. Her current research interests include pedagogical interventions in the classroom, including how to best teach technical and professional skills.
Rennie B. Kaunda Colorado School of Mines
Dr. Rennie Kaunda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mining Engineering at Colorado School of Mines, and a licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Colorado. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Kaunda spent more than 7 years in the mining industry. Dr. Kaunda’s areas of expertise are mining geotechnics, including rock mechanics and hydrogeology.
Elizabeth Holley Colorado School of Mines
Elizabeth Holley is an assistant professor in the Department of Mining Engineering at Colorado School of Mines, where she specializes in mineral exploration and mining geology. Her research applies geological tools to solve problems throughout the mining lifecycle, and her research group's work is funded by the federal agencies such as National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, as well as NGOs and mining companies. In addition, Elizabeth and her students work on issues involving pedagogy, science policy, and communities.
Abstract
The ethical practice of engineering requires engineers to go beyond considering how their profession contributes to a broadly construed “public good.” While the paramountcy principle importantly places social responsibility at the center of engineering practice, Deborah Johnson [1, pg 93] argues that it also treats the public as a “black box” and “hides all the complexity and diversity in the public.” In “Ethics is Not Enough,” Carl Mitcham (2016) attributes this focus on impossibly large social groups to engineers’ comfort dealing with idealized abstractions. In this paper, we analyze the extent to which taking a critical approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR) changed the ways in which engineering students identified potential stakeholders and imagined ways to harness engineering designs to benefit them.
The paper draws from pre- and post-module survey responses of about 450 students in targeted mining engineering, petroleum engineering, and liberal arts courses conducted from Fall 2016 to Spring 2018 at the Colorado School of Mines, Virginia Tech, Marietta College, and South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. To address the questions of how students identified stakeholders and strategies for using engineering to benefit them, we focus on two groups of questions: one that asked students to identify stakeholders and the other that asked them to rate examples of potential CSR projects. We conduct paired t-tests, conduct the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank tests for the non-parametric samples, and calculate the effect size to determine if the changes in student-by-student responses observed over the course of the modules were statistically significant. We offer preliminary assessments of why student learning varies across courses, including content and context, instructor background, and length and depth of the CSR modules. Finally, we use that analysis to offer some initial recommendations for teaching practices that broaden students’ understandings of who stakeholders are and how engineering can be harnessed to promote their wellbeing.
References
1. Johnson, D. (2017). Rethinking the Social Responsibilities of Engineers as a Form of Accountability. In D. P. Michelfelder, B. Newberry, & Q. Zhu (Eds.), Philosophy and Engineering: Exploring Boundaries, Expanding Connections (pp. 85–98). Switzerland: Springer. 2. Mitcham, C. (2016). Ethics is Not Enough: From Professionalism to the Political Philosophy of Engineering. Leadership and Personnel Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, 1350–1382. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-4666-9624-2.ch060
Smith, J. M., & Rulifson, G., & Grady, C. L., & Smith, N. M., & Battalora, L. A., & Sarver, E., & McClelland, C. J., & Kaunda , R. B., & Holley, E. (2019, June), Critical Approaches to CSR as a Strategy to Broaden Engineering Students’ Views of Stakeholders Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32567
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