sponsoring the 5th grade

sponsoring the 5th grade of a local inner-city school is in its fourth year. When we present the opportunity to join the faculty in this project we note that inequities in academic achievement in inner city schools is a problem that affects all citizens. This is something that we can do, and as a reason for action we quote President Hoover: “It (liberty) demands freedom from frozen barriers of class, and equal opportunity for every boy and girl to win that place in the community to which their abilities and character entitle them.”9 This is an idea that we want our students to consider for themselves, but they see it more clearly as they help to provide an opportunity to be competitive to children who might not have this chance under normal conditions.

Not all students volunteer and not all faculty members volunteer, but there is enough involvement to affect the culture in the school. A large number of projects are available with opportunities for students to contribute as little as 20 minutes of time and still have a meaningful experience. When a project is in progress it does become a topic of conversation and it provides an opportunity for students and faculty to engage in thinking about our professional responsibilities to our community. All of our students can benefit from such conversations.

Links to ABET 2000 The overall approach used by PSE to teach ethics has been to embed our ethics teaching into the entire curriculum. By creating a culture in which ethics is a foundational strand we also increase the probability that the strand is picked up in many of the other courses taught in our department. Faculty members who think about ethics can certainly bring up ethical issues as something to consider in any engineering problem – and students who are sensitive to ethical issues may very well introduce them without the instructor’s prompt.

When our students do take the required ethics class from a philosophy professor they are in a better position to learn more because they have thought about many of the issues within the context of engineering. It is difficult to quantify this but it is definitely an intangible benefit of our approach.

The spirit of the ABET EC 2000 Criteria is to build certain strands into an overall curriculum. Criteria f (understanding of professional and ethical responsibility) and h (broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context) are directly addressed by the approach to teaching ethics presented in this paper. The interplay between topics formally covered in class and topics presented in a professional work context (co-op) allows us to create an environment in which ethics becomes an essential element of our program.

In essence we have shifted our focus from delivering a prescribed content to providing a context to practice the profession of engineering. This does not mean that we are free to ignore content, instead we bring the content to the students in the more meaningful context of engineering practice. Sometimes this may mean that we will lose some content, but then we will emphasize criterion i by telling the student where they must look to find the content not directly required for the project at hand. All of the

Embedding Ethics into an Engineering Curriculum

Science and Engineering Ethics, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2004 381

criteria that are difficult to address in a more traditional approach to engineering education: d,f,g,h,i,and j can be effectively addressed by this approach.