Integrating ethics across the curriculum through sustainability topics (original) (raw)
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In recent years there has been a notable emphasis from professional bodies on embedding professionally relevant issues, such as sustainable development and ethics into academic courses for engineering and product design. For instance the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) recently published its curriculum map for introducing ethics into the engineering curriculum for courses that do not explicitly cover this at present. The guidelines include a suggested three step approach, including an audit of current methods, a plan of action for the future and the implementation of the plan. The authors are attempting to begin the process of introducing ethics into its engineering and product design courses using these three stages. Currently, the team is about to enter the final and potentially most challenging stage of the process. This paper is presented as a case study, giving an overview and evaluation of the experiences of this team thus far, with reference to other case studies from overseas and our own experiences in the UK.
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Purpose -The aim of this paper is to explore the rationale for teaching sustainability and engineering ethics within a decision-making paradigm, and critically appraise ways of achieving related learning outcomes. Design/methodology/approach -The paper presents the experience of the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney in teaching environmental sustainability and engineering ethics to third-year undergraduate students. It discusses the objectives of the course and the merits and drawbacks of incorporating ethics and sustainability in the same teaching framework. In addition, it evaluates ways of incorporating theoretical and applied perspectives on sustainability. Findings -Ethics and sustainability overlap but do not coincide; incorporating them in the same engineering course can be effective, provided that points of linkage are clearly recognized in the syllabus, a suitable combination of theory and practical applications is drawn upon and adequate teaching methods, including decision-making case problems, are used. Research limitations/implications -While environmental sustainability, economic rationality and ethical reasoning can be easily fitted into the syllabus, social sustainability is more difficult to teach because it requires a significant conceptual departure from deep-seated preconceptions on the part of students and teachers, and does not lend itself easily to conventional classroom activity, such as lectures and weekly workshops. Further research on effective ways of incorporating social sustainability in engineering curricula is therefore needed. Originality/value -The paper evaluates sustainability issues within the context of civil engineering education.
Towards a new future in engineering education, new scenarios that european alliances of tech universities open up
This paper reports on a feasibility study on including ethics and social issues in the current curriculum of a school of engineering and information technology in an Australian university. The study has three goals: first, to understand the current status of inclusion of ethics and social issues in engineering courses. Second, to understand the willingness of staff within the school to include ethics and societal issues in their courses. Third, to understand the opportunities and challenges for inclusion of ethical and societal issues in the coursework. Our methods include interviews with school staff and subject matter experts as well as analyses of textual artifacts such as course outlines, course readings, student assignments, and accreditation reports. The analysis of textual artifacts runs partially via an automated text analyzer that search for words that have ethical connotation, such as safety, responsibility, privacy, harm, etcetera in the dataset of course materials. A man...
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This paper describes a one-day workshop format for introducing ethics into the engineering curriculum prepared at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM). It responds to the ethics criteria newly integrated into the accreditation process by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). It also employs an ethics across the curriculum (EAC) approach; engineers identify the ethical issues, write cases that dramatize these issues, and then develop exercises making use of these cases that are specially tailored to mainstream engineering classes. The different activities and strategies employed in this workshop are set forth. Specific references are made to the cases and exercises developed as a result of these workshops. The paper ends by summarizing the different assessments made of the workshop by addressing the following questions: how did it contribute to the overall ABET effort at UPRM; could other universities benefit from a similar activity; and how did the participants evaluate the workshop?
Sustainability and ethics are taught in different forms in engineering degrees. No assessment has been made in the literature of the rationale for teaching them within a common decision-making framework. Following a re-organisation of the Civil Engineering curriculum at the University of Sydney in 2003, a new third-year unit of study entitled "Engineering and Society" has been added to the core program. The course introduces students to issues of environmental and social sustainability and ethics in civil engineering practice. We draw on our experience in designing and delivering the course to evaluate the way in which ethics and sustainability can be integrated in the syllabus. We describe, and reflect on, some of the obstacles encountered in achieving learning outcomes and engaging students in the learning process. We make a number of recommendations, especially in relation to syllabus structure and teaching social sustainability.
Repositioning ethics at the heart of engineering graduate attributes
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The integration of ethics in engineering education has largely been focused at the curriculum design level. The authors posit that this integration be done at the accreditation level and investigate how ethics may be more extensively incorporated in the documentation of a particular engineering accreditation body's qualification standards. The paper proceeds, by means of a narrative review, to justify an expanded conception of the teaching of ethics within engineering education. It builds a synthesis of contrasting conceptual approaches to the teaching of ethics within engineering and proposes a conceptual framework to guide both regulators and educators to identify and engage with different elements of the ethics across the curriculum within an engineering programme. The South African case study provides a context to engage with existing policy formulation around programme accreditation and to demonstrate the application of the proposed conceptual framework across the graduate attributes so to indicate how ethics might be more comprehensively integrated within a programme. This demonstrates that ethics needs to be repositioned at the centre of the preparation of engineers, rather than at the periphery. The expected consequence of this integration is the more extensive incorporation of ethics within and across accredited engineering programmes.
Curriculum analysis of ethics in engineering: a case study
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For several decades, there have been warnings about certain ethical faults in engineers regarding corruption in different works, which lead to collapses and the death of people, calling engineering into question and affecting the social development of communities. Ethics is an educational responsibility, the ethical debate must take place inside and outside the classroom, since studies carried out in different universities indicate that ethics continues to be a pending subject in engineering programs. This study seeks to contribute to educational innovation for the teaching of ethics in engineering through documentary review and interviews with students and teachers. It was found that the education of ethics in engineering should be included in the curriculum as an important factor in the training of engineers, from a practical dimension, which includes the study of cases, moral dilemmas, and based on problems applied to the environment.