2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work is an Evidence-based practice paper.

As engineering educators, we want our students to become ethical engineers when they graduate, and we devote time in the curriculum to preparing them. One aspect of being a professional in any field is having a shared set of guiding principles, and professional engineering societies all have codes of ethics. These codes, as well as many other resources about ethical frameworks and steps in decision making, are available for classroom discussions, and there are databases of case studies (e.g. https://onlineethics.org/). Our organization, XXXX, held a one-day workshop on these topics for engineering faculty in 2022. However, we recognized that we ourselves are professionals of teaching and professionals of engineering, and rarely formally consider our ethical responsibilities as faculty. Faculty encounter situations where ethical decisions need to be made in teaching and advising, but often our decisions are framed by our internal sense rather than referencing community norms. Following our workshop on teaching professional ethics to engineering students, we held two sessions on faculty ethics. Our sessions were attended primarily by experienced faculty, but we believe that sessions similar to ours would be particularly important to new faculty or to graduate students as part of their socialization to the profession, and the literature supports this (e.g. Reybold, 2008). In the first session we discussed what it means to be a member of a profession, and then asked whether faculty were familiar with the university faculty handbook and the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics. The literature indicates that faculty are rarely acquainted with these. We then asked faculty working in groups of three or four to write down answers to the following prompt: “Without reference to those documents, what are the main things in your own professional code of conduct governing teaching and/advising?” Before reporting out on this, we discussed the AAUP and university guidelines, a list from Lyken-Segosehe et al. (2018), and an ethical framework called “ethics of care.” Finally we reflected on which of these elements faculty had identified and which they had missed and will discuss this in the full paper. In a second session we discussed a case study adapted from Ethical Dilemmas in the College Classroom: a Casebook for Inclusive Teaching, produced for the Center for the Integration of Research Teaching and Learning (available at CIRTL.net) by Cirillo and Silverman, and followed the guidelines for discussion in that book. The case, about team dynamics, prompted good discussion, but our experienced faculty rapidly made decisions about how to handle the scenario. We know that this does not happen when the case is used with graduate students, and we suspect that inexperienced faculty would also find it challenging, and will test this hypothesis in sessions with recent PhD graduates. In summary, ethics is as important to the teaching profession as to the engineering profession, and we can recommend doing similar workshops at other institutions.

We are happy to present this work as a talk or poster.