2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering students require the ability to critically analyze social systems in order to act for the betterment of global society. Our design-based research project aims to support the development of aerospace engineering students’ critical consciousness, a Freirean construct describing the ability to critically analyze systemic oppression from a social justice lens. To emphasize the sociotechnical nature of engineering, we investigate how macroethics lessons can be effectively integrated into aerospace engineering science courses and pursue educational research in this context. We pose two research questions to inform the curriculum: RQ1) What are undergraduate students’ current awareness and perceptions of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering?, and RQ2) In what ways do students feel their education is or is not preparing them to address macroethical issues?

Over the past year, we have made progress on addressing RQ1 and 2 through parallel quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitatively, we continued to develop a survey and began analysis of preliminary results from 98 students at a large, public, research university in the Midwestern U.S. The survey contains 28 Likert-scale questions about students’ perceptions of the current state of aerospace engineering and 13 questions about their idealized vision for the aerospace engineering field. We are conducting factor analyses of this data to identify the degree to which they conform to the five factors identified in the pilot version of the survey: 1) a belief in the criticality of the relationship between aerospace engineering and society, 2) the ease or difficulty of being an ethical aerospace engineer, 3) the connection between technological determinism and aerospace career paths, 4) an emphasis on macroethics in aerospace engineering coursework via discussions, and 5) the ability of faculty to facilitate conversations on the macroethics of aerospace. The preliminary results of the survey offer interesting insights into how students morally grapple with macroethical issues in aerospace.

We are also conducting qualitative research focused on students’ perceptions of macroethical issues specifically related to their future engineering careers. In our work, we have seen that students recognize macroethics is particularly salient when choosing a career. To address this, we have designed lessons and focus groups based on the Theory of Planned Behavior. This theory hypothesizes that one’s intentions and behaviors (i.e., students’ career aspirations and intentions) are influenced by one’s attitudes (i.e., their attitudes toward the macroethics of certain careers), cultural norms (i.e., their perceptions about the way others value certain careers), and perceived behavioral control (i.e., their beliefs about their ability to obtain a job that aligns with their values). In this research, we will first investigate students’ attitudes through individual interviews. We will then conduct focus groups with the same pool of subjects investigating cultural norms and perceived behavior control. For these focus groups, we will group students of similar academic years and with similar personal attitudes. The results of these focus groups will inform changes to our macroethics lessons and the aerospace engineering curriculum to better support the development of critical consciousness.