2018 Best PIC IV Paper: Engineering Ethics Division: Faculty Perceptions of Challenges to Educating Engineering and Computing Students About Ethics and Societal Impacts

Evaluating ethics and societal impacts (ESI) is an integral part of engineering in an increasingly globalized and technology dependent world. Despite the recognized importance of ESI in engineering education and its inclusion in accreditation criteria, students’ instruction on this topic has been widely viewed as deficient. This paper explores some of the challenges that confront educators who teach engineering and computing students about ESI. Between September 2016 and April 2017, 37 interviews were completed via Skype or phone and lasted 30-70 minutes. The interviews were conducted to gain insight into educators’ teaching practices and broader perspectives on ESI education. The participants were asked, “what challenges have you encountered in incorporating these topics?” and discussions of challenges also arose spontaneously throughout the semi-structured interviews. Content logs and transcripts of the interviews were created and analyzed using emergent, thematic coding to identify the challenges that faculty experienced in teaching engineering and computing students about ESI. Of the 37 interviews, 31 discussed challenges (or lack there of) and were able to be transcribed; this sub-set is the focus of the paper. Analysis of the data indicated that barriers to effective instruction fell under five broad themes: students, faculty, institutional, curriculum, and engineering skills. Of the interviewees, 23% encountered only challenges, 64% described both challenges and affordances, and 13% described not encountering any challenges. Despite the obstacles, the interviewees expressed the importance of integrating ESI into engineering education and produced examples of teaching these topics in a range of settings with a variety of pedagogical approaches. Analysis of the interview data from educators who did not perceive any significant challenges also sheds light on the circumstances and strategies that facilitate effective ESI instruction. Introduction Ethics has been recognized as an important part of engineering education and professional responsibility. The inclusion in accreditation criteria [1] and professional codes [2] provides an impetus for fostering ethical awareness and judgment. In a systematic literature review of engineering ethics education articles, Hess and Fore found that 65% of the interventions were justified or motivated by ABET accreditation [3]. Despite its importance, there are a number of “systemic barriers to effective ethics education” [4, p. 346]. One challenge is a lack of student engagement, which can be evidenced on course evaluations where “students overwhelmingly rate the ethics component of the course as the least interesting, least useful, and the most trivial” [4, p. 347]. This aligns with Cech’s examination of the culture of disengagement within engineering [5]. In a longitudinal study of 326 engineering students, Cech found students’ commitment to public welfare, as measured by the importance they place on professional and ethical responsibility, consequences of technology, use of machines, and social consciousness, declined between their freshman and senior year [5]. Her work surmised one of the ideological pillars of this culture is technical/social dualism. This dearth of engagement is bred when engineering students often view ethics as peripheral to engineering practice although in reality, the two are inextricably linked [6]. The very structure of engineering education contributes to students’ sentiments towards ethics. The narrow technical emphasis of the engineering curriculum creates “a massive black hole whose gravitational pull inexorably absorbs the students’ attention, time, and fidelity“ [4, p. 349]. The crowded curriculum also poses a challenge for programs interested in providing standalone ethics and societal impact (ESI) courses [6]. Beyond the barriers at the student and curricular level, many engineering faculty are ill prepared or unwilling to teach ethics. Without the educational background or incentives to acquire that knowledge within the academic reward system, “the average faculty member may not do a stellar job” integrating ESI into their classroom [4, pp. 348-49]. Herkert claims, “the greatest challenges, however, will confront engineering faculty” [7, p. 311]. When programs do not require or even offer a dedicated ethics course, “it is incumbent upon the engineering community” to integrate ethics “within the context of technical courses”, “which begins with self-education” and “faculty development” [7, p. 311]. Haws expresses that for many engineers, “engineering ethics, at least the theoretical aspects of engineering ethics, is beyond our expertise” [8, p. 227]. However, Bucciarelli expresses that not feeling qualified does not negate the need for teaching it [9]. For ethics to be effectively integrated and prioritized in the curriculum, faculty engagement is essential [10]. A fundamental challenge in engineering education is the narrow conceptualization of ethics and the role of engineers. Ethics are framed by professional codes of ethics [10] but this paradigm has limitations. The individualistic approach of teaching ethics through cases of professional practice that emphasize the role of individual engineers and codes is a simplistic framing that averts attention from the broader context [11]. Engineers are not individualistic and autonomous in their work; instead, they “exist and operate as a node in a complex network” [12, p. 181]. Focusing on the individual actions and responsibilities of engineers often comes at the expense of examining the societal context, which confines ethics education [13-15]. This problem can be extrapolated to industry. The division of labor in engineering has brought a dilution of responsibility [16]. By only working on a small part instead of thinking of the whole, engineers are disconnected from their responsibility [12]. Instead, engineers need an awareness of holistic thinking to understand the unintended consequences of their products and designs and that paradigm shift needs to begin in the classroom [10]. ESI education must span both microethics, the decisions and responsibilities of individual engineers, and macroethics, the responsibilities of the profession to society, such as sustainability and social justice [7, 17]. Furthermore, engineering education needs to engage ethical and societal issues instead of “engineer-izing” them [4]. Engineer-ization attempts to fit a square peg into a round hole by imposing technical problem solving on issues that are not meant to be solved that way. Conlon and Zandvoort also recognize the limitations of imposing technical problem-solving and assessment strategies because it assumes that ethical issues can be resolved with objectively correct solutions [11]. With an ever-increasing dependence on technology and globalization, the importance of educating engineering and computing students about ESI will only grow. Looking to the future, Zandvoort et al. argue one challenge will be integrating ethics in all programs and reaching all engineering students [15]. However, achieving this end will require overcoming “resistance from students, scientific educators, school directors and from the profession itself or sometimes from employers” [15, p. 300]. In the United States, 80% of engineering students graduate from programs that do not require an ethics course [7]. Although challenges in engineering ethics education have been well documented, the literature mainly comes from the observational and anecdotal perspective of few educators. This research attempts to better synthesize and characterize the challenges that faculty have encountered and how they have overcome them so that lessons can be extracted from their experience about how to effectively teach ESI to engineering and computing students. The following research questions are related to those objectives. Research Questions RQ1: What challenges have educators encountered or perceived when teaching engineering and computing students about ethics and the societal impacts of engineering and technology? RQ2: For educators who did not face any challenges, what circumstances or strategies allowed them to effectively integrate ethics and societal impacts of engineering and technology into their courses, programs, and/or co-curricular activities? Methods Data Collection The research presented in this paper is situated within a larger study with broad goals related to exploring the ESI education of engineering and computing students. The first phase of the study involved the development and dissemination of online surveys to understand how educators teach engineering and computing students about ESI. Survey participation was solicited via email from authors of papers on engineering ethics, National Science Foundation (NSF) grantees studying engineering ethics education, members of various American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) divisions, and mentors of cocurricular engineering organizations. Additional information of the survey invitation and distribution has been published [18, 19]. The survey questions probed at ethics related topics, teaching methods, and assessment strategies as well as instructional settings such as different course types and co-curricular activities. The survey also sought feedback on perceptions of the sufficiency of ESI education and broad perspectives regarding ESI. At the end of the survey, respondents were asked to provide their email address if they were willing to be contacted for a follow-up interview. Of the 1448 survey respondents, 230 indicated willingness to participate in an interview. The second phase of the study involved conducting interviews with educators to learn more about their ESI instructional practices and general perspectives regarding the integration of ESI into the engineering curriculum and educational experiences of engineering students. Between September 2016 and Apri