Abstract
Ethical engagements in engineering education typically take on a form where students approach and write about ethics with the assumption that ethics is a realm apart from engineering. What would it mean to ask engineering students to consider ethics an essential part of all of their work, and to think of engineering creativity as an implicitly ethical field? This study begins by returning to Steven B. Katz’s (1992) influential essay “The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust,” offering an alternate, rhetorical model for how to approach ethics with engineers as an urgent necessity. It then analyzes, as an instructive example, the pitfalls of a commonly used engineering writing textbook, David F. Beer and David A. McMurrey’s A guide to writing as an engineer (4th ed.) (2014), showing how ethics can become supplemental priority for engineering pedagogy despite institutional calls to prioritize ethics in engineering education. It also explores the larger theoretical issue of why this is so, citing warnings by Erin A. Cech (Science, Technology, and Human Values 39:42-72, 2014), Olivia Walling (2015), and a new study by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog (Engineers of jihad: The curious connection between violent extremism and education, 2016) that limited ethical training may be a serious professional and personal liability for engineers. Finally, presenting student work produced in an engineering writing course at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) involving creative “devil’s advocate” ethics assignments, it shows how defending potentially problematic technologies can help students develop an awareness of how ethical considerations can generate legitimate ideas for new engineering solutions.
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Notes
- 1.
I am a Lecturer in the UCSB Writing Program, which, as of academic year 2016–2017, is an independent campus unit of 47 full-time faculty. The Writing Program offers undergraduate general education courses at the lower and upper division levels, in discipline-specific as well as interdisciplinary and professional writing contexts; a professional writing minor; graduate courses focusing on writing and writing pedagogy; and a Ph.D. emphasis in Writing Studies. The Engineering Writing Sequence (or “E-Sequence”) is a dedicated lower-division series of three courses, which exclusively serve students in UCSB’s College of Engineering in their first 2 years of study.
- 2.
In collaboration with the UCSB College of Engineering, the UCSB Writing Program offers engineering students a series of discussion- and workshop-based writing courses: Writing 1E: Approaches to Writing for Engineers, Writing 2E: Academic Writing for Engineers, and Writing 50E: Writing and the Research Process for Engineers (students may test out of Writing 1E, depending on their performance on the University of California’s system-wide Analytical Writing Placement Exam). All of these courses are capped at 25 students, and all are limited to College of Engineering students in their freshman or sophomore years of study. The courses are staffed by full-time faculty lecturers and professors who teach in the sequence on a regular basis. The sequence mirrors the general first-year writing track available to all students, with a few key differences, including goals stated in the course catalogue to help engineers learn to write in a variety of engineering-related genres, such as technical reports, multimedia presentations, and collaborative projects. The UCSB Course Catalogue (2016) description for Writing 1E explicitly states that the course may “include a consideration of ethics within the world of engineering,” and Writing 50E, “the final course in the sequence, prepares students for the profession of engineering through a focus on collaborative research and teamwork.”
- 3.
“Nowadays engineering writers are getting away from the rigid use of the passive. Sentences become more vigorous, direct, and efficient in the active form. By showing that a person is involved in the work, you are doing no more than admitting reality” (p. 57)
- 4.
The 2004 edition added a chapter titled “Documentation and Ethics in Engineering Writing.” In the 2009 third edition, the present order was introduced, where the discussion of general ethics occurs first and the documentation material second: “Ethics and Documentation in Engineering Writing.”
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Moore, K.C. (2017). Ethical Dilemmas in the Engineering Writing Classroom. In: Bairaktarova, D., Eodice, M. (eds) Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49352-7_8
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