Interrupted Identities and Engineering Ethics: Ability, Relationships, and the Public and Private of Engineering

• In Event: Sustainability & Transformation in Engineering Education - I: Overcoming Disjunctures in the Cultivation of Professional Skill Sets

Abstract

This paper explores how engineering students navigate educational cultures, educational reform efforts, and their own identity formation around notions of ethics broadly construed. It asks how students develop ethical knowledge and make meaning around ethics as a central aspect of their educational experience. Drawing on dozens of semi-structured interviews about the formal and informal dimensions of educational and professional enculturation, the authors describe how students identify and characterize the contradictions rampant in engineering educational reform efforts aimed at enhanced student engagement and emphasizing engineering’s social relevance. Student characterizations are interpreted through three scholarly traditions: the broad literature on student-centered engineering education reform, queer/crip theory, and disability studies. We posit students’ ethics identities are continually interrupted by the disjunction between, on one hand, explicit messaging about academic integrity, professional service, technical competence, and engineering’s public benefits and, on the other hand, implicit messaging around (cap)ability, qualification, authority, responsibility, and the standard engineering “hallmarks” of objectivity, neutrality, and meritocracy. Within this disjunction and the real/imagined social conditions of engineering work, we discuss three under-theorized processes in the formation of ethical knowledge: the construction of an attitude around “ability,” the construction of “the public,” and the formation and role of the public/private division in engineering practice. The analysis of student understandings of this disjunction considers a perspective on how engineers’ professional practice and identities might be transformed in ways that are not merely re-formations.

Authors

• Mitchell Cieminski, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Dean Nieusma, Colorado School of Mines