A Practitioner Account of Integrating Macro-ethics Discussion in an Engineering Design Class

Engineering education research has started to attend to the idea that the education of a socially responsible professional engineer will, in part, require the weaving of social responsibility and engineering macro-ethics into the fabric of the engineering curriculum. In this paper, writing as an engineering design instructor, I present my own successes and challenges with incorporating notions of social responsibility and macro-ethics in an engineering design lesson. The lesson plan evolved over a period of 10 semesters. I document the process of that evolution and discuss how students’ responses to activity prompts influenced that evolution.