2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering ethics education is essential for future graduates, yet it is often seen as a secondary “complementary” or “soft” skill (Seniuk Cicek et al., 2024). Engineering educators are rarely given pedagogical guidance on how to teach or assess engineering ethical reasoning skills, and therefore courses often emphasize more objective and quantitative approaches for teaching and assessing ethics, i.e. they tend to “engineer-ize ethics” (Newberry 2004, 350) and overemphasize rules and codes (Rottmann & Reeve, 2020).

As a new faculty member who was hired to teach our engineering ethics course, I have observed and reflected on the current systems, cultures, and processes. In this paper, I reflect on the ways in which students are adeptly aware that they are getting an ethics education that does not provide them with any ethical reasoning skills. Using an autoethnographical case study of my experience in my first two years of teaching engineering ethics, I analyze weekly reflections.

This paper will present an overview of the two courses I have co-taught: the first with the previous instructor and their content, and the second with my content and a graduate student co-instructor who was supporting the redevelopment. The four main findings from the analysis of reflections include: (1) the need for bridging across paradigms (both with faculty members and students); (2) challenges with assessment; (3) valuing assessment over valuing learning; (4) maintaining my own mental wellbeing.

Overall, this research emphasizes the importance of teacher reflections to continuously observe the power and forces that are driving decisions within the academic institution, especially within ethics education.