Engineering Ethics Education for Social Justice

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper describes incorporation of social justice into engineering ethics education. Current teaching of engineering ethics pays inadequate attention to social justice, mirroring engineering education in general. While many authors have called for a reconsideration of the fundamental canons of engineering ethics, there has been relatively less work on teaching and developing ethics from viewpoints that highlight social justice. We have recently begun a project to address this gap, focusing on curriculum design and collecting preliminary data to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. In this paper we describe the theoretical foundations for the class, the design principles, and the research approach to determine its effectiveness.