2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Ethics is an integral part of engineering, a profession that serves public welfare and operates at the intersection between the natural and built environment. The university experience is critical in developing professional and societal responsibility as future engineers learn both content knowledge and professional socialization. Faculty members are critical in these processes as they influence engineering education through their course instruction and informally through their role as key socializing agents. Faculty members and students both shape and are shaped by their environment. Within the academic environment, culture provides a way to view the values, decisions, and norms of a group. Culture can influence internal responses to external forces, such as accrediting agencies, industry stakeholders, and government priorities, all of which have articulated the importance of ethics in engineering education. This study examined the dynamic between organizational culture and ethics education. The research was guided by the following research question: how do educators experience academic culture related to the ethics and societal impacts education of engineering students, and how, if at all, does the culture affect their teaching practices? This research paper was part of a larger study that included semi-structured interviews with 28 educators who taught ethics and/or societal impacts to engineering students across various disciplines and represented 26 institutions in the United States. The larger project explored faculty members’ teaching practices and perspectives, including influences on their ethics-related instruction. The data indicated the role of environment and culture, which was the focus of this paper. The analysis was underpinned by a framework of organizational culture in higher education, which proposes six dimensions: environment, mission, socialization, information, strategy, and leadership. The dimensions served as guideposts in the deductive analysis of the interview transcripts to understand which aspects of academic culture were salient in engineering ethics education. The findings pointed to the tension between the espoused value of ethics and its limited visibility in the curriculum, the influence of the religious mission of a university, the way in which the importance of ethics is communicated to students via academic integrity, and the role of formal leaders in supporting ethics educators. This research illuminated the cultural undercurrents that affect ethics education with the aim of creating environments in which ethics education and ethics educators are supported.