Tinkering with Technology: How Experiential Engineering Ethics Pedagogy Can Accommodate Neurodivergent Students and Expose Ableist Assumptions

The guiding premise of this chapter is that we, as teachers in higher education, must consider how the content and form of our teaching can foster inclusivity through a responsiveness to neurodiverse learning styles. A narrow pedagogical focus on lectures, textual engagement, and essay-writing threatens to exclude neurodivergent students whose...

4E cognition, moral imagination, and engineering ethics education: shaping affordances for diverse embodied perspectives

While 4E approaches to cognition are increasingly introduced in educational contexts, little has been said about how 4E commitments can inform pedagogy aimed at fostering ethical competencies. Here, we evaluate a 4E-inspired ethics exercise that we developed at a technical university to enliven the moral imagination of engineering students....

Fostering responsible anticipation in engineering ethics education: how a multi-disciplinary enrichment of the responsible innovation framework can help

It is crucial for engineers to anticipate the socio-ethical impacts of emerging technologies. Such acts of anticipation are thoroughly normative and should be cultivated in engineering ethics education. In this paper we ask: ‘how do we anticipate the socio-ethical implications of emerging technologies responsibly?’ And ‘how can such responsible...

Investigating factors related to ethical expectations and motivations among Chinese engineering students

Research in engineering ethics has examined the effects of education on the ethical knowledge and reasoning of students from mostly WEIRD (Western educated industrialized rich democratic) cultures. However, it is unclear that findings from WEIRD samples are transferable across cultures. China now graduates and employs more STEM (science...

Learning to Reframe Problems Through Moral Sensitivity and Critical Thinking in Environmental Ethics for Engineers

As attention to the pervasiveness and severity of environmental challenges grows, technical universities are responding to the need to include environmental topics in engineering curricula and to equip engineering students, without training in ethics, to understand and respond to the complex social and normative demands of these issues. But as...

Developing conceptual and methodological foundations for a cross-cultural, multi-institutional study of ethical reasoning and moral dispositions of engineering students

This full research paper develops a framework for using comparative case studies to triangulate with quantitative survey data in engineering ethics education research.Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments of contemporary engineering present challenges to effective...

Performing ethics of technology: Using improvisational performance-based techniques in engineering ethics education

The paper explores the potential for improvisational techniques used in ethics tutorials with the aim of fostering moral sensitivity. Recently there has been an increased interest in researching how performance-based techniques can foster certain ethical competencies. In ethics education for engineering, role-playing games have been an example...

How to Teach Engineering Ethics?: A Retrospective and Prospective Sketch of TU Delft’s Approach to Engineering Ethics Education

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft’s approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach...

Ethics education for engineers, creating open educational materials

We propose a workshop on creating Open Educational Materials for teaching ethics to engineering students, based on a project encouraging the reuse, creation and open publication of Case-Based Exercises within a community of ethics and philosophy of technology scholars in the Netherlands.