2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress study explores student perceptions of ethics in undergraduate aerospace engineering. Macroethics education is a topic that has been traditionally left out of aerospace engineering undergraduate programs, often leaving students ill-equipped to assess and address the positive and negative impacts of their future career field on humanity. Defined as the teaching of collective social responsibility within the engineering profession and societal decisions about technology, macroethics helps novice engineers better understand the real implications of their work in society. Aerospace engineering has been historically dominated by white cis-gendered male students, and the privilege that this majority holds affects the lens through which students perceive macroethical concepts in the field. Thus, there is a vital need for macroethical concepts to be included in undergraduate aerospace engineering curricula.

This study extends previous iterations of our research, in which one-day macroethics lessons were implemented into undergraduate aerospace engineering courses (Benham et al., 2021). These data were used to inform the development of a survey that was distributed to students in a senior-level aerospace engineering course at a different large, historically white, research-intensive, public university (Benham et al., 2022, Ennis et al. 2023). This work seeks to investigate undergraduate students’ perceptions and awareness of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering from a purely qualitative lens using a grounded theory methodological framework. Qualitative data from the survey explored students’ perspectives of what it means to be an ethical engineer, unethical practices in engineering, and other related questions and were inductively analyzed to identify common themes. Preliminary findings from the data analysis–the initial coding phase of a longer constructivist grounded theory analysis–identified that students demonstrate varied levels of awareness regarding macroethics in aerospace. Students expressed levels of acceptance, claiming to see “both sides” of the ethical arguments and that the role of aerospace in the defense industry is a “necessary evil”, or displayed resistance, desiring changes be made to the industry and more accountability as a consequence for their actions. In addition, students had a diverse understanding of who ultimately benefits from the aerospace industry, with students focusing on specific stakeholders, nations, or society at large. Other emergent themes explored students' understanding of the role of government/economy in the aerospace industry, ethics in professional practice, and students’ feelings of conflict or apathy about the role of aerospace engineering in the defense industry. These initial themes will be used to develop broader theories about how students construct meaning around macroethics in engineering disciplines. The overarching theories will be used to inform teaching practices concerning ethics in engineering education, refine future iterations of the macroethics lesson, and increase motivation to integrate macroethical education into existing aerospace engineering curricula.