Integrating Ethics in Engineering Education through Multidisciplinary Synthesis, Collaboration, and Reflective Portfolios

This article discusses two multidisciplinary courses created at the Colorado School of Mines that were developed to integrate ethics into the first-year engineering curriculum: “Nature and Human Values” (NHV) and “Innovation and Discovery in Engineering, Arts, and Sciences” (IDEAS). In both NHV and IDEAS, our objectives are to meaningfully integrate personal and professional ethics within a larger context of integrating humanities and social sciences with engineering curricula. We teach students how to apply ethical reasoning in support of engineering solutions through user empathy, problem definition, stakeholder engagement, communication of outcomes, and analysis of contexts and impacts. In the process, we emphasize personal morals, professional ethics, and environmental ethics via literary readings and case studies that have a strong central narrative of engineering and / or environmental impacts. Students practice close reading and analysis, communication in many rhetorical modes, and evaluation of and reflection about the wider contexts and effects of design solutions. These practices, as well as course assessments, enable a focus on synthesis across learning outcomes. Collaboration between faculty from many disciplinary areas as well as student teamwork and group projects also supports this synthesis, and reflective portfolios encourage students to explore their ideas at different learning stages and to review their own perceptions and decisions over time. Our overall theory of change is to simultaneously infuse engineering problem solving with values-sensitive analysis and design, requiring communication skills and ethical reasoning at every step.