Using The Engineering Method To Research And Write About Corporate Practice: A Model For Teaching Engineering Ethics

Introduction The pressure to include, if not emphasize, the importance of ethics in the engineering curriculum is one of the most perplexing challenges facing engineering educators today. For one thing, it is difficult to decide where exactly to put ethics in the curriculum. With course requirements that are already bursting at the seams, it’s hard, as Michael Davis suggests in his article “Teaching Ethics Across the Engineering Curruiculum” 1 to fit a free-standing course in ethics into the curriculum or to “make what it teaches seem a routine part of engineering.” And unless we are able to make it “seem a routine part of engineering” students will resist our best efforts. One strategy that Davis recommends is a pervasive approach to ethics infusing a discussion of ethics in existing courses at all levels.