2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The lessons-learned paper documents our ongoing project to create faculty development programs in engineering ethics, with an eye to sharing insights that may be transferable to other types of faculty development. To provide background for our project, the College of Engineering at Penn State University has an endowment having the goal of developing faculty competencies to integrate ethics into the engineering curriculum and assess student learning of ethics. Since the university and the College of Engineering are considerably large, comprised of many units with stakeholders in engineering ethics— including various departments, institutes, centers, and programs—getting to know our faculty, surveying their existing efforts, and identifying interest groups are foundational to the success of our faculty development programs. In the process, we referenced the asset-based community development (ABCD) approach and adapted it to our mission of faculty development.

This paper discusses the opportunities presented by the ABCD approach for faculty development. Even though we are still in the planning stage of faculty program development and only begun an initial step, we found that the ABCD approach’s focus on faculty assets and community development provides lessons learned for our initial plan to advance engineering ethics education. While our experience of faculty development is situated in engineering ethics and future work remains to be done to assess the impact of our projects, we suggest the ABCD approach may be applicable to other types of faculty development programs where knowledge, skills, experience, or professional interests play an important role.