Reflections on Teaching Ethics Unethically [evidence-based practice, DEI]

Robyn Mae Paul

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Conference: 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Publication Date: June 22, 2025
Start Date: June 22, 2025
End Date: August 15, 2025
Conference Session: Engineering Ethics Division (ETHICS) Technical Session - Ethics education methodologies and interventions
Tagged Division: Engineering Ethics Division (ETHICS)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 10
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/57116

Paper Authors

biography

Robyn Mae Paul University of Calgary orcid.org/0000-0002-5619-5754

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Robyn Mae Paul is an Assistant Professor in the Sustainable Systems Engineering at the University of Calgary. Her research and teaching focuses on applying frameworks from social justice, queer theories, indigenous knowledges, and ecofeminism to broaden the narratives of engineering culture and foster more inclusive spaces and more socially just and sustainable engineering designs. She has achieved this work through tools including narrative inquiry, storytelling, and agent-based modeling.

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Abstract

Engineering ethics education is essential for future graduates, yet it is often seen as a secondary “complementary” or “soft” skill (Seniuk Cicek et al., 2024). Engineering educators are rarely given pedagogical guidance on how to teach or assess engineering ethical reasoning skills, and therefore courses often emphasize more objective and quantitative approaches for teaching and assessing ethics, i.e. they tend to “engineer-ize ethics” (Newberry 2004, 350) and overemphasize rules and codes (Rottmann & Reeve, 2020).

As a new faculty member who was hired to teach our engineering ethics course, I have observed and reflected on the current systems, cultures, and processes. In this paper, I reflect on the ways in which students are adeptly aware that they are getting an ethics education that does not provide them with any ethical reasoning skills. Using an autoethnographical case study of my experience in my first two years of teaching engineering ethics, I analyze weekly reflections.

This paper will present an overview of the two courses I have co-taught: the first with the previous instructor and their content, and the second with my content and a graduate student co-instructor who was supporting the redevelopment. The four main findings from the analysis of reflections include: (1) the need for bridging across paradigms (both with faculty members and students); (2) challenges with assessment; (3) valuing assessment over valuing learning; (4) maintaining my own mental wellbeing.

Overall, this research emphasizes the importance of teacher reflections to continuously observe the power and forces that are driving decisions within the academic institution, especially within ethics education.

Citation
Format

Paul, R. M. (2025, June), Reflections on Teaching Ethics Unethically [evidence-based practice, DEI] Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/57116