Ways of Experiencing Ethics in Engineering Practice: Variation and Factors of Change

Abstract

He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. His current research explores engineering students' experiences with innovation, empathy across engineering education and engineering design settings, design thinking in the course design process, and novel uses of qualitative research methods in engineering education.

Ethics in Engineering or Engineering in Ethics?

“…Here I think we might distinguish between positivism, post-positivism, and various interpretive paradigms. I see this over and over again in our interviews with folks in the study mentioned earlier [10]. Engineers prize objectivity and many choose not to recognize the subjective nature of many aspects of ethical engineering practice.…”

“…But as I write this, I realize that we should likely partition between professional codes of ethics and organizational or industrial codes of ethics. As I think about the latter, for many engineers in a separate study [10], company codes were influential and provided comfortability with ethical decision-making processes, particularly for more junior practitioners. Yet, rarely did engineers in this study talk about professional codes beyond the organization.…”

Promoting Research Quality to Study Mental Models of Ethics and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Engineering

“…Thus, we will question whether the mental models themselves best represent select phenomena in more specific contexts or settings. For example, discourses among academic interviews might be directly associated with the phenomena, "engineering ethics education," like in Katz [4], whereas mental models derived from practitioners may be closer to "ethical engineering practice" as situated in workplace environments [32]. Conversely, some practitioners may focus on "D&I" rather than "DEI," which may bring subtle but critical shifts in foci and mental models.…”