Infusing Ethics Across the Curriculum in Biological Engineering: Background, Process, and Initial Results

To meet complex ethical challenges in the engineering profession, students need ethics learning experiences that are integrated systematically across the engineering curriculum. Sustaining systematic changes in the engineering curriculum also calls for processes that respect and engage the engineering faculty. This paper reports the work to date of creating a faculty-driven process for infusing ethics across an undergraduate biological engineering curriculum. To illustrate this emerging change process, we report the generation of program level ethics learning objectives, the identification of an ethics course sequence, and the design, implementation, and assessment of an ethics module in a junior engineering biochemistry and microbiology course. Our project to date highlights a number of lessons for enabling a change process for program-wide ethics education in engineering. These lessons include strategies for disrupting existing curriculum patterns and encouraging novel ideas, engaging the faculty adopters of new curriculum, as well as seeking and maintaining leadership and support for ethics education in the discipline.