September/October 2018

In Focus: Ethics
Putting Ethics Into Practice

Want engineers who do the right thing? It helps to give them an early start.

BY PATRICK INGRAHAM

Most organizations and businesses preach sound ethical behavior and require employees to take some form of ethics training, but learning about the moral values that influence decisions in the workplace and putting those values into practice are easier said than done.

Although professional engineers are equipped with technical and practical expertise and are some of the most knowledgeable and brightest individuals in their given fields, many face ethical challenges in their day-to-day work. Ethical practice in engineering is vital for ensuring the public trust in the field and in its practitioners. Some organizations, NSPE included, use case-based reasoning to teach professional ethics, or look at ethical dilemmas on a case-by-case basis.

While many see this approach as a best practice in ethics training, there is still much to be understood about how professionals learn ethics using case-based reasoning. Reading case studies and attending seminars and ethics workshops, of course, do not necessarily ensure that individuals will make ethical decisions when difficult situations arise in their careers.

So, how can professionals ensure that solving ethical dilemmas at work will be second nature when they do arise?

Some, like Jackie Gerstein, an online instructor of education technology for several universities including Boise State University, believe the answer to getting individuals to consider practicing ethical values and establishing guidelines in their studies and work starts at a young age.

“Information access and abundance, and emerging technologies, are advancing and being developed and disseminated at rates that the human mind often can’t comprehend,” Gerstein says. “So now, more than ever, ethics should be integrated into young people’s educations.”

Regardless of whether a young student is interested in pursuing a STEM career, Gerstein and other advocates for teaching ethics in secondary—and in some cases, primary—education say there are many useful resources for teaching students the sometimes-complicated nature of ethical decision making.

With STEM education becoming a larger focus in primary and secondary education, and technology advances enabling quicker communication between people of all ages, some educators have realized that it is vital to teach young students good ethics, particularly in their online behavior.

The Association for the Advancement of Computing Education, located in Chesapeake, Virginia, advocates using the moral development theory to introduce young students to thinking critically about ethical issues. The theory revolves around how morality and ethical decision-making change over time and how education can shape those decisions.

One way educators put this theory into practice is a by presenting young children with different scenarios or stories in which there is a moral or ethical dilemma. Teachers then ask the children how they think the subject of the story should have acted in a given situation and to analyze their responses. As students develop, presenting them with more hands-on or practical activities to increase their understanding of ethics is key, too, according to Gerstein.

Aside from incorporating the moral development theory into young schoolchildren’s early education, another resource many educators cite as a great tool in teaching ethics is the University of Notre Dame’s John J. Reilly Center’s top 10 list of ethical dilemmas and policy issues in science and technology.

The list is put together by Notre Dame students in a range of programs and released each December. Educators say using it as a teaching tool in schools is a great step in increasing young people’s awareness of these issues.

For example, Mary Purdy, a Spanish teacher at Agawam High School in Massachusetts, used the list to generate roundtable discussions and activities for her Spanish language and culture class, instructing her students to research the issues on the list and assigning them a Spanish-speaking country to contextualize the issues for that place--—all for a class roundtable discussion. Students then presented to the class a mock educational campaign using advertisements they had created about a particular issue on the list.

Following the roundtable discussions, the students then debated each other on the different sides of each issue and educational advertisement activity, allowing them to show off the full breadth of knowledge they had gained throughout the course.

“I suspect that a Spanish class would not be the first class to come to mind if you thought about the potential for high schools incorporating the resource into their classrooms, but for this course we spend a great deal of time looking at these social issues and their impact on individuals and society as a whole,” Purdy said.

The next step in getting students, and in this case, professional engineers, to understand and ingrain the concepts of sound ethical decision making into their minds is to put a great emphasis on ethics at the college level.

In 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report entitled Infusing Ethics Into the Development of Engineers: Exemplary Education Activities and Programs, which details a handful of exemplary undergraduate and graduate engineering programs at universities across the country that have been implementing ethical practice into their curriculum in unique or effective ways, by fulfilling one or several of the following criteria:

• Provides an interactive format that encourages active learning;
• Occurs across multiple years of a student’s education;
• Includes an institutional faculty reward structure that supports ethics training;
• Connects students’ ethics learning to engineering practice;
• Promotes improved ethical decision-making and problem-solving skills;
• Incorporates innovative or creative educational methods;
• Demonstrates a widespread or lasting impact on students; and
• Can be scaled up or easily replicated at other institutions.

One of these is a course taught at the Kansas State College of Engineering, Responsibility of Engineering: Codes and Professionalism. The course, which is required for graduate students, involves students conducting a formal interview with professional engineers about ethical challenges they have faced, creating a two-hour engineering ethics workshop, authoring their own professional engineering code, and creating a workshop for their peers with roundtable activities and discussions, among other requirements.

Steven Starrett, P.E., director of Kansas State’s Honor and Integrity System and an associate professor of civil engineering, teaches the class and refers students to the NSPE Code of Ethics. “I don’t expect this course alone to change an ‘unethical’ engineer into one with high standards,” Starrett says. “I do expect students who complete the course to be better able to understand which alternatives are ethically acceptable and which are not, champion ethical solutions when part of a team faced with an ethical dilemma, and generally conduct themselves as a professional with high standards.”

Starrett says that both informal and formal feedback from students has indicated how much they have learned. Course evaluation and assessment surveys given to students routinely indicate that students not only grasped but also advanced their understanding of the ethical engineering concepts taught in the class.

While a few other select universities offer their own engineering ethics courses and programs, the United States Coast Guard Academy’s civil engineering program is one of the few service academy programs that fosters ethical leader development through a variety of core courses in humanities, science, engineering, mathematics, maritime studies, organizational behavior, and law.

For example, in an environmental engineering course at the USCGA, students evaluated a case study on pollutant limits from multiple perspectives. They read engineering codes of ethics, then researched and prepared presentations for the class on the various problems and potential solutions, as well as the legal, ethical, and societal issues involved in identifying and cleaning up hazardous waste sites.

A capstone project furthers their training by requiring students to apply their knowledge to develop solutions to real-world problems while considering the project’s economic, sociopolitical, ethical, and environmental aspects.

Beyond education, though, continuing to incorporate ethics training and practice into everyday business is of vital importance. Once students become professionals and enter the workforce, ethical decision making is necessary for not only economic reasons, but also for the safety, health, and welfare of the public.

Each year, the Ethisphere Institute, a global leader in defining and advancing standards of ethical business practices, releases its list of the “most ethical” companies. These companies are evaluated in five areas: ethics and compliance programs, corporate citizenship and responsibility, a culture of ethics, governance and leadership, and innovation.

The 135 companies spanning 23 countries and 57 industries honored for 2018 were at the forefront of implementing values-based leadership into their business strategies, and companies increasingly discussed their purpose in broad, community-focused terms.

“Over the last 12 years, we have repeatedly seen that those companies who focus on transparency and authenticity are rewarded with the trust of their employees, their customers, and their investors. While negative headlines might grab attention, the companies who support the rule of law and operate with decency and fair play around the globe will always succeed in the long term,” says Ethisphere CEO Timothy Erblich.

In short, engineering firms and engineering programs across the country should be looking toward the future with the mindset of infusing ethics into everyday practices, and teaching ethics in a unique and interactive way from a young age will serve as the basis for values as individuals grow in their education and careers.