2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In a living library, individuals (referred to as "human books") volunteer to share their personal experiences and perspectives with "readers" (other people) through face-to-face conversations. Living libraries were introduced in the 2000 and have become popular as a means to draw attention to sensitive topics, tackle stereotypes and challenge prejudices.

In engineering education, ethics is a subject that students show disinterest and resistance, and disengage with (Polmear et al., 2018; Romkey, 2015; Cech, 2014). There is a prejudice of the significance of ethics for engineering work rooted in the depolitisation of the curriculum and a hierarchisation of sciences that sees technical subjects as superior (Martin et al, 2021). To address this prejudice, the author introduced in the course “Decisions Under Risk and Uncertainty” a living library of 4 “human books” recounting in a 1h30min dialogue with students the ethical dilemmas encountered in their practice and the way they pursued their responsibility. These course sessions can be considered live and interactive ethics case studies, featuring Zach Pirtle (NASA), Ben Pauli (author “Flint Fights Back”), Laura Nolan (whistleblower Google Project Maven and volunteer for Stop Killer Robots) and Diana Bairaktarova (Virginia Tech).

At the end of the course, students submitted a reflective assignment where they chose one “human book” and were asked to discuss how they view their responsibility as future engineers and how their understanding has changed after the session with their chosen individual.

In this study, we analyse student reflections to map how responsibility is articulated upon the exposure to the living library of ethics case studies. The study found that macroethical understanding of responsibility prevail, with each case study highlighting different macroethical issues related to power dynamics, stakeholder engagement, collective action, and epistemic gaps between experts and ‘laypeople’. This finding suggests that having engineering professionals present and discuss with students the ethical dilemmas encountered in practice may be a way to broaden students’ understanding of their professional responsibility, while exposing students to the variety of ethical issues engineers need to consider.