Ethics education conference draws international audience

What happens when a large university decides to change how it teaches ethics to its science and engineering students? How does that new material get integrated into an already demanding course-load and technical training for STEM majors?

And how do you track the changes in culture as they move through the web of personal and professional relationships in the institution? Or maybe most importantly: What does an education in ethics even mean to faculty and students?

Those questions were the subject of a six-year grant from the National Science Foundation awarded to the Department of Engineering Education in the College of Engineering, which culminated in a two-day workshop in June that drew 90 participants from 10 countries. 

“When you realize roughly two-thirds of our students are involved in science or engineering — and that all of our students will be influenced by changes in technology that will happen in the 21st century — an education in ethics about how to employ those tools for maximum benefit and minimum detriment becomes incredibly important,” said Thomas Staley, collegiate associate professor in materials science and engineering and the principal investigator for the grant. 

The grant’s transdisciplinary team, led with Staley and co-investigators Stephen Biscotte and Diana Bairaktarova, have met twice a month since the grant’s start in 2017. As the work progressed, the research branched into three areas of interest: focus groups with faculty and staff, a survey of 1,500 students, and how the shift in culture spread through the university.

“I’ve been involved with ethics during my whole academic and industry career through teaching, research, and as a design and manufacturing engineer,” said Bairaktarova, associate professor in engineering education. “And this has been one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on. It’s been fascinating.”

The grant largely coincided with the implementation of Pathways General Education, a transdisciplinary curriculum launched in 2018. The program requires all undergraduates to take 45 credits over seven core concepts and two integrative concepts, including ethical reasoning. 

“When Virginia Tech rolled out the Pathways program, after years of reimagining its Gen Ed curriculum, it provided the perfect laboratory to study ethics education campuswide,” said Biscotte, assistant provost for undergraduate education. “The grant raised several important and challenging questions: What does ethical reasoning mean? How should it be taught? And how do we connect instructors with resources and support to integrate ethical reasoning into their courses?

“Those are the questions our team has worked to answer and ultimately share with colleagues both inside and outside our community,” he said. 

Central to that outreach two-day international workshop held at the end of June on Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus that explored current topics in STEM ethics and undergraduate ethics education research. 

“The workshop was an opportunity to explore all of the dimensions of the work that’s been done over the last six years,” said Staley. “For an internal audience, people involved in ethics and undergraduate education were able to see the patterns our research found in and around campus.

“Also, about 60 percent of the workshop’s content was from external contributors which gave us an opportunity to learn how ethical education is approached on campuses around the world,” he said.

Forty-five universities, including six European institutions, were represented at the June workshop, exploring such topics as ethical identities, professional ethics, ethical infrastructures, ethics and artificial intelligence, and much more. 

“We are working on ethical questions in Switzerland too, but it's very nice to see a project in a very advanced stage,” said Vladimir Macko, a researcher at the University of Neuchatel. “It's a nice reference for us to see these issues studied on a large scale at an institution like Virgina Tech. One of the things I will be taking home is how we could apply this to European universities.”

A post-conference survey found the event, called the CCE STEM Summer Workshop, was extremely well received with respondents rating it 4.67 out of a potential five points.

“I've been really inspired and energized because it is so exciting to see people working on a really important issue from such an incredible range of perspectives and topics,” said Amanda Kellogg, associate professor of English at Radford University. “There are people here who are in engineering education, but we're also talking about AI and faculty development - it's just great to see a group of people come together.”

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency with an annual budget of more than $8 billion that provides grants to support all fields of science and engineering. The grants account for about 25 percent of the federal support to America's colleges and universities, funding more than 300,000 researchers at 2,000 universities.

The project’s abstract, titled "Institutional Transformation: Cultivating an Ethical STEM Culture Through an Integrated Undergraduate General Education," can be found on the NSF website. Since 2017, the project has received $711,203 in funding. 

In addition to Bairaktarova, Biscotte, and Staley, researchers included Kojo Akrong, Talha Bin Asad, Hesam Hosseinpour, Karen Gilbert, Jill Sible, Sam Snyder, and Hao Wang. 

The team plans to continue to publish its results next year on student and faculty perceptions of ethics and ethics education as well as the faculty social network that guides programmatic change.

“This work has been extremely valuable also because for our graduating engineering students, their education should be grounded in ethical reasoning as much as in their technical training,” said Bairaktarova. “Hopefully, after they leave the university and start their careers, being ethical will become part of their professional identity. ”