Lessons learned from teaching with an ethics toolkit

Abstract

In this paper, we illustrate what we have learned in the process of implementing a new approach to ethics education for engineering students. The premise of our approach is that engineering education provides students with a wide variety of tools and skills: mathematics, chemistry, physics, computer programming, and discipline specific knowledge. However, one area in which our students tend to be underprepared and tend to be lacking in analogous "tools" to solve problems is in ethics. The approach to ethics education that we advocate stresses the psychological variables that influence people with good intentions to act unethically. We have designed a class that uses video clips containing re-enactments of published empirical studies that demonstrate why people act unethically. After a discussion of each video, each individual student is guided through a two-part exercise. The first part, developing a Personal Inventory Report, helps the student engage in self-reflection in order to determine what sorts of situations the student might find ethically challenging. In the second part of the exercise, the student develops a personal plan (Adaptive-Strategies Report) addressing what strategies they might use in order to increase the likelihood that they will act ethically in challenging situations (that is, the situations arrived at while developing the Personal Inventory Report). © American Society for Engineering Education, 2013.