Using a Framework to Define Ways of Integrating Ethics across the Curriculum in Engineering

Abstract

Ethics are an important part of engineering and computer science education for many reasons, ABET accreditation being only one. Historically, engineering ethics have been taught as a part of a specific class, often outside of the engineering and computer science disciplines. Additionally, ethics is an important part of education in other disciplines, including medicine and law. Movements for teaching ethics across the curriculum emerged in these fields before comparable movements in engineering that became more common in the early 2000's. Integration of ethics across the engineering and computer science disciplines remains isolated, with examples most common in biological and biomedical engineering. It is possible that, despite the availability of ethics workshops and other resources, many teachers of engineering and computer science are limited in their ability to fit ethics into their classes. After all, engineering statics or circuits do not immediately present themselves as easy courses to insert ethical case studies. Because of this, ethics remains, in many cases, confined to external courses or to senior design. What constitutes an ethical issue in engineering is typically defined loosely, by looking at professional codes of ethics and concomitant case studies. This paper presents an alternative approach based on an ethical framework developed at James Madison University as a part of an ethics across the curriculum effort. The framework was used as a basis for work at an NSF-sponsored workshop on the future of STEM education by a small group of researchers. During the workshop, the group focused on application of the framework to biology. After the workshop, they re-visioned the outcome to apply to engineering and computer science. The framework is presented together with a tool developed to guide any instructor at the college level to select ways to insert ethical considerations into their class. These insertions could come from case studies, every day examples, or even instructional approaches.