2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Educating the Whole Engineer: Leveraging Communication Skills to Cultivate Ethical Leadership Character

Presented at Engineering, Ethics, and Leadership

Effective communication skills are fundamental to the practice of engineering and fundamental to engineering education. Effective communication skills can also become a vehicle to cultivate character and promote ethical and professional practices. In this paper, we analyze a series of eight communication focused lectures presented to senior engineering students in an effort to identify character virtues that are also promoted via the teaching of effective practices of communication. Our group believes that leveraging professional skills, such as communication skills, to promote ethical conduct and character development is an important responsibility of engineering educators. In this paper, we will highlight important topics of communication that should be part of every engineering curriculum from the lens of ethics and character cultivation. We believe this paper has the potential to transform how we teach communication skills to engineering students and how we can authentically integrate two often siloed topics - ethics education and communication skills. Virtues that are inherent in the teaching of effective communication in engineering contexts include honesty, integrity, courage, empathy, humility, resilience, responsibility, justice, curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. Examples and specific scenarios will be presented in this paper.

Authors

Mrs. Farnoosh B. Brock Prolific Living Inc. [biography]

Farnoosh Brock went from electrical engineer and project manager at a Fortune 100 to an entrepreneur, published author (4 books), speaker and trainer in 2011. She has coached and trained hundreds of professionals at all levels of the organizations in their Mindset, Leadership and Communication Skills. She delivers her workshops at universities such as Johns Hopkins, Duke and Wake Forest and has spoken her message at many places such as Google, Cisco, MetLife, SAS, Fidelity, Walmart, the US Airforce and several membership-based associations. She believes that changing our conversations from selling to serving can elevate our people and our profits to its highest levels. She shares exact mindset and methodologies on how to do this in her latest book, The Serving Mindset: Stop Selling and Grow Your Business and is passionate to bring this the power of serving to audiences everywhere. Farnoosh works with her husband of 20 years, Andy and they are a united in their mission & passion and strive to bring this message to top groups that share the value of true serving.
Dr. Jessica Koehler Wake Forest University [biography]

Dr. Jessica Koehler is the Senior Research Scholar for the Wake Forest University Program for Leadership and Character in the Professional schools. In her role she also supports with the development and assessment of character and ethics education in the engineering program.
Mr. Andy Brock Prolific Living [biography]

Andy Brock is an electrical engineer with 13 years of IT experience primarily in the software, networking and security space. He worked as a security architect and network solution engineer for government projects before starting his company, Prolific Living Inc with his wife, Farnoosh Brock in 2012. Today, they partner with universities such as Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, as well as visionary organizations to educate engineers and their leaders on Leadership, Communication and Character skills.
Dr. Olga Pierrakos Wake Forest University and National Science Foundation [biography]

Dr. Olga Pierrakos is a rotating STEM Education Program Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation (a second stint). Olga is also the Founding Chair (2017-2022) and a Professor of Wake Forest Engineering. With a unique vision to Educate the Whole Engineer and a commitment to Human Flourishing, Olga led Wake Forest Engineering to be ranked as one of the top (14th) "Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs" by US News Report (2023). With this unique vision, Olga has also served as the principal investigator since 2019 on a multi-year Kern Family Foundation KEEN (Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network) award titled "Educating the Whole Engineer" to integrate important competencies such as virtues, character, entrepreneurial mindset, and leadership across the Wake Forest Engineering curriculum. She has led Wake Forest Engineering with a focus on inclusive innovation and excellence, curricular and pedagogical innovation, and creative partnerships across the humanities, social sciences, industry, entrepreneurs, etc. in order to rethink and reimagine engineering education. All this has led to Wake Forest Engineering achieving unprecedented student diversity (42% women, 25% racial and ethnic minorities) and faculty diversity (50% women, 25% racial and ethnic diversity). Olga is an engineering education researcher, biomedical and mechanical engineer, and national leader in transforming undergraduate engineering education. She has served as founding faculty of two brand new engineering programs (the first at James Madison University) and served on several national roles across ASEE, ABET, AAAS, NSF, KEEN, etc.

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