Collaborative Research: Research Initiation: Using stories from traditional culture as case studies to teach virtue-based engineering ethics

About This Grant

Engineers play a pivotal role in society. Therefore, it is critical to train engineering students to be ethical engineers. However, studies have shown that employers often see a lack of ethical decision-making among recent graduates. An innovative engineering profession for the 21st century requires engineers to reflect and act ethically when facing complex global, social, and ethical challenges of engineering practice. Traditional approaches to engineering ethics education have been largely limited to the use of codes of ethics of engineering societies and regulatory boards and case studies derived from disaster cases. Engineering ethics has been expressed primarily in rules, and these rules are primarily negative or prohibitive in nature. This rule-based approach, along with a focus on technical ethics, ignores the internal motivational element present in professional life that cannot be adequately accounted for by rules. In addition to rule ethics, there is another ethical tradition with a long history that can provide a more adequate framework for teaching engineering ethics: “virtue ethics” or “ethics of character”. The earliest moral theories in antiquity made virtue the focus of their account of the moral life. Virtue ethics focuses on questions of what kind of person one should be and how one may achieve that, thus it intimately ties moral behavior with one’s character. This project will use stories from traditional culture of different countries to help engineering students identify virtues present in the stories, make connections to engineering ethics, and improve ethical decision-making. We will integrate the ethics training with students’ coursework. Using stories from different cultures will help students see universal values and be more receptive to different cultures. The virtue-based engineering ethics approach will enable students to build a strong foundation for their professional development as engineers. This is aligned with research in the professional formation of engineers which seeks to advance holistic engineering formation. Using a mixed-methods, theoretically grounded approach, we will develop materials for teaching modules that use traditional stories to teach engineering ethics and assess the effectiveness of the teaching intervention. This project will address two key research questions: 1) How do stories from traditional culture help students understand engineering ethics? 2) How does using stories from traditional culture to teach ethics inform students’ ethical decision-making? To answer these research questions, we will select stories from traditional culture to develop Virtue-of-the-Week teaching modules to help students identify virtues and make connections with engineering ethics. Historical figures can serve as role models for students and help exemplify the meaning of virtues (such as honesty and courage). Additionally, we will develop stories into case studies to help students practice ethical decision-making with the consideration of virtues. We also aim to integrate ethical decision-making with students’ coursework. We will develop pre-post assessments to quantitatively and qualitatively assess how students improve in their ability to identify virtues from stories, connect these to engineering ethics, and make ethical decisions. The teaching modules and assessments will be implemented in a 2-quarter chemical engineering senior design course. This project will provide useful information for other engineering faculty who are interested in incorporating engineering ethics in their courses. Using virtue-based character education for teaching engineering ethics will enable students to see the importance of virtues and apply them to ethical decision-making in their future profession, which will bring about greater benefits for society. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.