2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This theory paper provides the insight that teaching engineering ethics inevitably draws on an individual faculty’s knowledge and experience in their engineering field and proposes what we call “an asset-based approach” to developing faculty competencies in engineering ethics instruction. Our position is informed by a literature review showing the following: whereas the ideal of engineering education research seeks to identify and promote “best practices” in engineering education, this goal faces at least three sets of challenges in the practice of engineering ethics instruction. First, the scope of engineering ethics has grown and diversified owing to evolving accreditation criteria and reflections from the engineering education community. Second, teaching practices for engineering ethics also expanded and diverged accordingly to answer the increased and changing needs in engineering ethics education. Third, even when a promising ethics teaching practice is identified, there is a great variation in faculty views about its effectiveness, further compounded by the methodological challenges of assessment and inconsistent perspective changes among students after an engineering ethics education experience.

To provide a case study illustrating how teaching practices in engineering ethics vary greatly among faculty, we reviewed a selection of published articles which outlined their approach to ethics in response to one specific program/student outcome of ABET spanning accreditation cycles from 2005 to 2019, namely Outcome (h): “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context” and showed that teaching practices are highly dependent on faculty’s disciplinary backgrounds, experiences, or professional interests. Drawing on our own reflections in teaching-focused positions and findings from other researchers and educators, we proposed an asset-based approach to building faculty competencies for ethics instruction and describe three sets of faculty assets for practitioners to consider. Given that questions concerning the more personal, self-directing side of an educator’s professional growth have only been systematically explored in literature outside engineering education, we hope that our examination of the roles of faculty and their assets may begin a similar dialogue in engineering education.