| | | SEFI Ethics Special Interest Group Newsletter
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| The Ethics SIG Newsletter is issued 8 times per year and aims to share information on cutting edge engineering ethics research and practices. If you would like to join the mailing list please use the form on the SEFI Ethics SIG website.
If you would like to propose an item for the newsletter, please contact Roland Tormey [email protected], or Diana Martin [email protected], or Gunter Bombaerts [email protected].
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| A new SEFI Engineering Ethics Education Ahead |
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| Dear reader of this SEFI’s Ethics newsletter, Engineering Ethics was “omnipresent” at the 2020 yearly SEFI conference, with no less than nine sessions treating engineering ethics. This clearly shows a momentum in the Engineering Education community for engineering ethics education. It is an open door that engineering ethics is of utmost importance to Engineering Education. Engineering students should become aware of their future engineering roles, they should acquire the necessary knowledge, competences and attitudes to become responsible and critical professionals. But it will also come as no surprise for you that Engineering Ethics Education still has many challenges to answer the immense societal needs engineers are appealed to. All over the world, enthusiastic teachers and researchers are experimenting with topics and methods to increase the quality of engineering ethics education. The 2020 SEFI sessions gave a wealth of reports of teachers sharing their struggles or their careful or strong successes. Exchanging these insights among new and experienced engineering ethics teachers and course designers is what the SEFI ethics groups wants to do beyond the yearly conference. We think this all-year-round exchange could be beneficial for starting teachers trying to find their way in the complex world of engineering ethics education, experienced teachers trying to find new ideas or receiving feedback for their courageous experiments; and researchers who want to be critical to “new” results by applying evidence-informed analyses. We engage with several people in supporting this engineering ethics education community. - We decided to continue this monthly newsletter and the website.
- We will organise a second SEFI Ethics ‘Winter/Spring School” in which we bring enthusiastic people together to exchange ideas on engineering ethics course design and possible research about this.
- We will set-up a series of online seminars on engineering ethics education.
- We will explore policy and practice issues of ethics in European accreditation approaches; managing the change of introducing ethics; and developing a database of resources.
- We will coordinate an ethics reader (see call for interest in this newsletter).
We keep you posted on detailed information with this newsletter and our website. If you want to contribute to one of the above SEFI Ethics group challenges or you have ideas for other actions, please let us know. Keep up the good engineering ethics education work!
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| Call for input: The SEFI Ethics Reader |
Engineers will face ethical questions in their professional careers. Engineering degree programmes should have prepared the graduates for moral decision making. Engineering ethics should thus have been part of the education of engineers at the universities. In some countries, it is, and in others not. European and national organisations of engineers recommend engineering ethics to become a mandatory subject of instruction. Only in a few countries like Ireland and the UK are ethical issues constitutive to engineering programmes, and their delivery is monitored in the accreditation of degree programmes. The EUR-ACE Framework Standards and Guidelines for accreditation of engineering programmes in the European Higher Education Area are vague and simply demand that engineers should be able to reflect on ethical issues. However, engineering programmes at European institutions of higher education not always offer educational components devoted to engineering ethics. Although it would be more than desirable that engineering ethics become a mandatory subject in engineering education, the de facto situation in most European countries does not allow to change the curricula appropriately in the immediate future. Graduates from engineering degree courses are left alone with ethical questions unless they start studying literature on ethics on their own. Here, however, they might be lost in an abundant amount of literature on ethics that is neither meant for them, nor would be of much use for them due to the philosophical jargon. In this situation, SEFI aims to develop an Ethics Reader. Until now, only ideas for such a reader are around. The SEFI Ethics Reader might consist of e. g. 12 philosophical core texts on ethics, augmented by comments and examples on the chosen texts. The core texts themselves should not exceed 12 pages each, and also the comments and the examples should not be longer. It would be essential that the comments and the examples are written by engineers for engineers in the language of engineers. To get together, a first Zoom meeting for interested colleagues is intended for mid of November. To find a meeting date, a Foodle has been set up. If interested, please visit the Foodle and indicate your availability: https://terminplaner4.dfn.de/BX7Tj7QviI99oaxR |
- Manfred J. Hampe (TU Darmstadt, Germany and co-chair of the Ethics SIG, [email protected])
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| Open calls - Upcoming events |
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| Beyond Boundaries: Realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals 19-29 October 2020, UCL Grand Challenges and the Global Engagement Office (online)
Registration open |
Workshop “Ethics education for engineering students. Build your own teaching materials”, part of the Philosophy of Human Technology Relations conference 6 November 2020 (online) Registration open |
World Engineering Education Forum and the Global Engineering Deans Council 16-19 November 2020 (online) Registration open
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The On-line Forum on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology 17-19 November 2020 (online) Registration open
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Philosophy and the Climate Crisis Conference 11-12 June 2021 (online) Call for abstracts open (deadline 31 October 2020) |
The 17th CDIO International Conference
21-23 June 2021 (online) Call for abstracts open (deadline 15 November 2020) |
Building Inclusive Ethical Cultures in STEM: A Virtual Practice-Based Workshop
23-24 April 2021, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Texas San-Antonio (online) Call for proposals open (deadline 30 November 2020) |
Special Issue “Engineering Ethics: Bridging the Theory-Practice Gap”, International Journal of Technoethics Call for papers open (deadline 1 December 2020)
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Great Lakes Philosophy Conference “Ethics in Action” 9-11 April 2021 (online) Call for abstracts open (deadline 1 February 2021)
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| During the annual SEFI conference, the representative of SiG Ethics, Janna van Grunsven, was among the winners of the best paper awards. Taylor Stone, Lavinia Marin and Janna van Grunsven co-authored the winning short paper Before Responsible Innovation: Teaching Anticipation As A Competency For Engineers, which argues in favour of engineering ethics education and education for responsible innovation fostering historically informed anticipation as a core competency. To do so, they defined a set of interrelated virtues essential for engaging in historically informed anticipation, such as moral sensitivity, epistemic humility and moral imagination, which can be cultivated via a novel teaching method that involves an in-depth historically informed normative analysis of a value-technology dynamic, called a value-genealogy of technology. At the informal level, the SIG Ethics ticked another success, by winning the conference quiz. The team comprised by Pieter de Vries, Helena Kovacs and Diana Martin quizzed their way through questions and questions about Dutch culture and showed that they really know how many slices of bread with chocolate sprinkles does an average Dutch person eat per year. |
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| The online undergraduate conference Ethical Engineering for Sustainability, Wicked Problems, and Beyond is looking for participants. Professors, if you are teaching courses such as Engineering Ethics, Environmental Ethics, or Philosophy of Technology, you can assign group projects that attend to the theme of the conference. Guide students into crafting abstracts of 200-300 words that describe their projects, focusing on the normative nature of their topics. Groups whose proposals are accepted will be invited to present through an online platform. While the focus is on group presentations, individual papers are also welcome. There are no costs of any kind. More info here, or contact the organiser Shane Epting at [email protected] |
UCL celebrates a decade of addressing grand societal challenges, releasing the report UCL Grand Challenges: Over 10 years of Developing Solutions. The report features case studies such as “Accelerating the Uptake of Sustainable Urban Transport Policies and Land Use Planning in the Global South”, “Essential Diversions: Urine Diversion Toilets in Durban, South Africa” and “Exploring HEXAI (Human Centred Explainable Artificial Intelligence)”. The report can be accessed here
. In addition to the report, the UCL team prepared a special episode of the Grand Challenges podcast, which features the founder of UCL Grand Challenges David Price and the Director of UCL Grand Challenges & Cross-Disciplinary Development Ian Scott, available here |
Recent articles and publications |
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| Corporate Social Responsibility Practices of Colombian Companies as Perceived by Industrial Engineering Students - link Author(s): Morales-Gualdrón, S.T., La Rotta Forero, D.A., Arias Vergara, J.A., Montoya Ardila J., Herrera Bañol, C. SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING ETHICS |
Ethics in Engineering and the Role of Responsible Technology - link Author(s): Ocone, R. ENERGY AND AI |
Teaching sustainable development through entrepreneurial experiences - link Author(s): Burden, H., Sprei, F. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION |
Applying sustainability into engineering curriculum under the background of “new engineering education” (NEE) - link Author(s): Qu, Z., Huang, W., Zhou, Z. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SUSTAINABILITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION |
SEFI thanks its corporate partners for their support: |
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