A Practitioner Account of Integrating Macro-ethics Discussion in an Engineering Design Class

Abstract

Ayush Gupta is Assistant Research Professor in Physics and Keystone Instructor in the A. J. Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. Broadly speaking he is interested in modeling learning and reasoning processes. In particular, he is attracted to fine-grained models of learning (based in microgenetic analysis, or drawing on interaction analysis). He has been working on how learners' emotions are coupled with their conceptual and epistemological reasoning. He is also interested in developing models of the dynamics of categorizations (ontological) underlying students' reasoning in physics. Lately, he has been interested in engineering design thinking, how engineering students come to understand and practice design, and how engineering students think about ethics and social responsibility. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2017A practitioner account of integrating macro-ethics discussion in an engineering design class Abstract: Engineering education research has started to attend to the idea that the education of a socially responsible professional engineer will, in part, require the weaving of social responsibility and engineering macro-ethics into the fabric of the engineering curriculum. In this paper, writing as an engineering design instructor, I present my own successes and challenges with incorporating notions of social responsibility and macro-ethics in an engineering design lesson. The lesson plan evolved over a period of 10 semesters. I document the process of that evolution and discuss how students' responses to activity prompts influenced that evolution.

Partnering with undergraduate engineering students to unearth cultural practices within a Science, Technology, and Society (STS) program

“…They collaboratively developed annotations and summaries of the articles they were reading. They produced memos analyzing transcript data from a personal lens, a political lens [20], an analytical lens (informed by methods in [21]), and practiced using conceptual and theoretical constructs from engineering education literature [1,5,[22][23][24]. Over the duration of the project, this research collaboration engaged six senior researchers and sixteen unique URFs.…”

Examining the “narrow” and “expansive” socio-technical imaginaries influencing college students’ collaborative reasoning about a design scenario

“…There is not space in the store to add more checkout lanes, but something must be done. You are hired as a consultant to help the company" [10].…”

“…Through Dr. Gupta's use of this prompt in his own introduction to engineering design course (see [10]), Dr. Gupta iteratively developed a lesson around this prompt and began tinkering with it. They describe changing the text of the prompt to read: "What do you think would be the impact on society, economics, corporations, owners, workers, etc.…”

“…if the solution was scaled up for use across many stores?" Dr. Gupta observed that the addition of this prompt in their class resulted in attention to new stakeholders: "widening the span of who is impacted" and "notic [ing] the links between different individuals/communities" ( [10], pp. 7).…”

“…In an attempt to challenge the cultural ideologies that narrow engineers' socio-technical imaginaries, programs like the Science, Technology and Society (STS) program at the University of Maryland in College Park, engage students in human-centered design and systems-thinking to provide on-ramps for more expansive thinking that aims to disrupt the status quo and to grapple with the ethical implications of engineers' work through a critical examination of "How," "For What," "For Whom," and "With Whom" students engage in design work [9]. In this paper, we present a preliminary analysis of first-year STS students collaboratively reasoning through a simulated design scenario about a small community store facing challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic (adapted from [10]). Using discourse and narrative analysis, we analyzed multiple focus group conversations to identify common "co-occurrences," or ideas that hang together in participants' reasoning, to identify the variety of ways socio-technical imaginaries play out in students' design thinking.…”