Treffer: Challenges and Opportunities: Faculty Views on the State of Macroethical Education in Engineering.

The meaningful inclusion of ethics in engineering education often seems to be a challenge in programs which are already packed full of technical content. Most often the ways in which ethics are included into engineering education relates to microethical issues such as ethical codes or personal professional conduct in the office. Macroethical topics, such as the profession's ethical obligations around climate change or sustainability, are less common and the ways in which macroethics are included in engineering courses has not been well studied. Two surveys were developed to explore the ways in which faculty teach students about macroethical issues; one focused on curricular settings and the other on co-curricular settings. Participants were asked to describe general topics that they covered in their respective settings and then to describe in detail the ways in which they include the societal impacts of engineering in a single course or cocurricular activity including specific topics, educational approaches and assessment tools. At the end of the survey, participants were asked in a free-response question to share their thoughts about the education of engineering students regarding broader impacts and ethical issues. This paper focuses on faculty response to this question. There were 406 responses to the open-ended question. These responses were coded using emergent, thematic coding. Inter-rater reliability was established for frequently-identified themes. The analysis of these themes highlighted four main themes: current practices, topics, challenges, and goals/opportunities. In talking about current practices, some faculty focused on engineering service opportunities or experiential learning as effective approaches. Examples of topics that were discussed include justice and community development contexts. Examples of challenges that were discussed include faculty having a limited knowledge or training about how to teach ethics or that ethics education is currently taught in ways that are too black and white and more nuanced topics should be included. Some goals or opportunities that faculty talked about indicate that students should receive a broader exposure to the societal impacts of engineering and that students should learn how to identify and negotiate work related ethical dilemmas. Some differences were found in the frequency that challenges and goals/opportunity-related themes were used between gender, tenured/tenure-track (T/TT) vs. non-T/TT, and institution types. The paper provides an interesting view of faculty perspectives on teaching ethical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]