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🎓 The first author is a student, at least 2/3 of the authors are students -Undergraduate, Master, Doctoral-; may include supervisor as one of the authors.
Practical toolkit for embedding ethics in the engineering curriculum
Sarah Jayne Hitt1, Stella Fowler1, Sarah Junaid2, Johnny Rich1
1Engineering Professors' Council, United Kingdom; 2Aston University
The need to embed ethics into the engineering curriculum is a collective imperative if we are to successfully navigate complexity, uncertainty and challenging ethical issues to build a sustainable society that works for everyone. To maximise positive impact, behaviours such as inclusivity and sustainability must become instinctive – golden threads running through everything that engineers think and do. Proactively, bringing engineering ethics to the fore in engineering programmes is one way UK higher education equips future engineers with the skills and mindset they need to succeed.
This workshop brings together best practice from expert practitioners across the UK, introducing a nationally curated ‘Engineering Ethics Toolkit’. To help educators to know and use the toolkit the workshop will be an attractive translation of engineering ethics teaching theory to the practice of engineering education.
In this workshop, participants will be introduced to a pragmatic approach to integrating ethics content into their teaching, using examples and a detailed and interactive curriculum map, which connects the elements of the toolkit. The workshop will introduce:
the need for a better understanding of the concept of ethics and support for issues surrounding its teaching;
real-life examples of ethics teaching practice across dozens of UK university engineering departments;
where and how in the engineering curriculum, ethics teaching can be embedded and teaching resources to support with this.
Participants will share applied and hands-on access to practical case studies and supporting articles to help them integrate ethics content into their teaching. We will access the fully searchable library catalogue, ensuring it is easily searched and understood and users are equipped to apply the toolkit to different teaching contexts.
Workshop participants will take away strategies and high-quality open-source engineering ethics teaching resources to enable engineering students to be able to identify ethical issues, exercise ethical thinking and use ethical judgement within their projects and coursework.
Our aim is to ensure the toolkit becomes an ongoing, regular component of engineering teaching and highlighting excellence in integrating ethics. The workshop will act as a seed to encourage further case studies to be developed and will also explore what can yet be done in this space to ensure the next generation of engineers are well-equipped to address the ethical issues they face.
