Abstract
Contemporary engineering education recognises the need for engineering ethics content in undergraduate programmes to extend beyond concepts that form the basis of professional codes to consider relationality and context of engineering practice. Yet there is debate on how this might be done, and we argue that the design and pedagogy for engineering ethics has to consider what and to whom ethics is taught in a particular context. Our interest is in the possibilities and challenges of pursuing the dual imperatives of socialization and critique. Socialization involves creating opportunities for all, in a diverse cohort of students, to access and engage with the dominant professional engineering ethics knowledge, while critique involves engaging with a range of ways of knowing, valuing, being and using language as relevant in contemporary engineering practice. We identify conceptual tools from engineering ethics and ethical pedagogy in education scholarship for our context. We illustrate how we use these tools systematically to strengthen our reflective practice in a first-year university engineering ethics module to a deeper form of reflexivity. Specifically, we explore the ways in which we attend to the dual imperatives and also highlight opportunities that we miss. We identify as key opportunities design choices such as how we formulated questions and prompts, and how we attended to content, context and language in selecting classroom texts. Other key opportunities were pedagogical choices of when and how to use student contributions in discussion, and what was made explicit in the classroom and assessment. We share our plans to take our learnings forward in our practice and consider the generative possibilities of these learnings and the concepts in other contexts.
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Notes
We acknowledge that ideas often attributed to particular named frameworks, e.g. ‘Euromodern’ or ‘African’, are present in other traditions, and are not necessarily unique to that particular framework (Okeja, 2012). In this article, we follow Christie (2005) and Harper-Shipman and Gordon (2020) in ascribing specific ideas to Euromodernism because of their inordinate contribution to this tradition, particularly when considered in the context of engineering.
We use these constructs to describe the context as they have been shown to matter in this context. Yet since identity is situated and contingent, we are conscious not “to speak decisively on behalf of specific social groups and specific individuals” (Walshaw, 2013, p. 104).
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Ngoepe, M.N., le Roux, K., Shaw, C.B. et al. Conceptual Tools to Inform Course Design and Teaching for Ethical Engineering Engagement for Diverse Student Populations. Sci Eng Ethics 28, 20 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-022-00367-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-022-00367-4