Making sense of ethics in engineering education: A discursive examination of students' perceptions of work and ethics on multidisciplinary project teams

Abstract

Multidisciplinary project teams in engineering education allow students to gain experience with engineering on a professional and practical level, while still maintaining a supportive learning environment. This context reflects the team-based and multidisciplinary nature of much professional engineering work. In an increasingly complex environment that requires collaboration across cultures and disciplines, training for young engineers must prepare them not only to be able to work effectively with diverse groups of people, but also to become ethical decision makers in this ethically complex environment. As ethics plays a major role in students' work and learning in engineering education, it is important to examine how they understand and interpret ethical issues as they are encountered, as well as how academic programs shape and frame these issues as students begin to develop the ethical decision making skills that will guide them throughout their careers. This paper examines the reflexive nature of how students interpret and make sense of their work in an engineering education context, and how this context may impact students' development and understanding of ethical decision making. The authors examine multidisciplinary project teams in different engineering education programs to see how students in these teams relate to one another, to the team itself, and how they understand ethics in this context.