Login

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Navigating the Mystery: An Approach for Integrating Experiential Learning in Ethics into an Engineering Leadership Program

Presented at Engineering, Ethics, and Leadership

This Practice Paper describes an approach for integrating ethics experiential learning into an Engineering Leadership (EL) program. We discuss motivations for EL programs’ continued efforts at incorporating and enhancing ethics learning; for instance, to strengthen students’ sense of connection between ethics and day-to-day engineering work, to grow their abilities to recognize decisions with ethical implications, and to build their awareness of how ethical lapses can transpire in team settings. We review experiential learning as a means of facilitating development in these areas through activities that immerse student teams into unfamiliar dilemmas requiring ethical reasoning. Further, we describe key challenges of operationalizing experiential learning in ethics, such as incorporating realism and unpredictability, prompting the critical thinking necessary for recognition of ethical dilemmas, and creating a learning context that does not feel contrived or exaggerated. We then present designs of a class session and an associated team-based experiential “engineering leadership lab” (ELL) recently developed at the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL). Focusing on the ELL, we discuss how this activity was structured to address aims and challenges; for instance, by embedding an ethical dilemma into a product development scenario requiring decision making under schedule and financial pressures in a realistic organizational environment. We share team-level performance observations from a recent instance of the activity; here, all 23 teams composing the program’s first-year cohort participated. We observed that team performance varied across a range of outcome categories: those that submitted the activity’s deliverables while failing to navigate its ethical dimensions, those that contributed deliverables reflecting a partial recognition or incomplete handling of ethical dimensions, and those that submitted deliverables reflecting thorough navigation of ethical dimensions. These performance observations were possible because the activity involved making resource choices linked to ethical implications, resulting in certain materials’ use (or absence) evident in teams’ physical deliverables. Students’ post-activity reflections, submitted after they participated in an activity debrief, included indications of intended learning in a majority of cases (83% of submittals) based upon a rubric. Drawing from activity observations and reflections, we discuss how teams’ ethical decision making appears to have been strained by various intended pressures intrinsic to the activity (e.g., time and resource constraints, a competitive context, and costs), yet, that many students’ reflections contained ideas for mitigating such pressures through enhanced critical thinking and team collaboration. Though program-level evaluation of ethics learning is ongoing, we conclude by sharing lessons-learned from this module’s development, identifying implementation considerations for other programs wishing to explore similar forms of ethics experiential learning.

Authors
  2. John M. Feiler Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  3. Leo McGonagle Massachusetts Institute of Technology [biography]
  4. Eileen Milligan Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  5. Alexander Rokosz Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  6. Elizabeth Schanne Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Download paper (10.3 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session