Macroethics in Aerospace Engineering: Implementing Ethics Lessons into Undergraduate Courses and Analyzing Student Perceptions of Issues within the Discipline

Abstract

This poster provides an overview of a project that embeds macroethics lessons into undergraduate aerospace This poster provides an overview of a project that embeds macroethics (Herkert, 2005) lessons into undergraduate aerospace engineering courses and investigates students' perceptions of ethical issues within the discipline. Macroethics education in engineering, which addresses the collective social responsibility within the engineering profession and societal decisions about the use of technology, has been traditionally left out of U.S. aerospace engineering programs, often leaving students ill-equipped to assess and address the positive and negative impacts of their future career field on humanity (Benham et al., 2022; Bielefeldt et al., 2017; Herkert, 2005). Teaching macroethical analyses help novice engineers better understand the real implications of their work in society (e.g. Andrade & Tomblin, 2018; Benham et al., 2021; Colby & Sullivan, 2008; Gupta, 2017; Jimerson et al., 2013; Palmer et al., 2022; Wareham et al., 2006). Aerospace engineering is not exempt from its own social responsibility, as is seen through the issues such as climate change, space resource mining, space debris, the military-industrial complex, and space settlement. Aerospace is also a discipline that has been historically dominated by white, cis-gendered, affluent men, which affects the lens through which macroethical concepts in the field are perceived. Thus, the inclusion of macroethical concepts in undergraduate aerospace engineering curricula also addresses improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field. In our design-based research, we simultaneously design macroethics curricula for undergraduate aerospace engineering courses and develop contextualized knowledge about undergraduate students' perceptions and awareness of macroethical issues in aerospace engineering. Our research has been conducted at two large, historically white, research-intensive, public universities in the Western and Midwestern United States. These universities are referred to as WU and MU in this abstract. We collected data on WU students� experiences from the lesson via anonymous Qualtrics surveys and used the results to inform the development of another survey that was distributed to students in the MU aerospace engineering program. Macroethics lessons have been implemented in two consecutive years of a sophomore aerospace vehicle design course at WU. An updated version of the macroethics lesson was then piloted in a junior-level spacecraft dynamics course at MU in Fall 2022, introducing students to a relevant macroethical topic for the course: orbital debris. In Spring 2023, another iteration of the lesson was implemented again in a sophomore-level aerospace vehicle design course at WU, that allowed students to discuss and explore diverse perspectives on topics such as space settlements and the military-industrial complex. The sociotechnical components of these lessons present the concepts of stakeholders, positionality, and ethical lenses 978-1-6654-5713-2/23/$31.00 �2023 IEEEto students, aiming for students to gain the resources and confidence necessary to analyze macroethical considerations in aerospace engineering. By bringing these lessons into “technical” aerospace engineering courses we also emphasize that engineering technology cannot be separated from its societal impact. More specifically, the goal of these lessons is to understand that there are a variety of perspectives on any given issue and that power and positionality affect how people think about these issues. Within this work, we report on Qualtrics survey data from the most recent implementations of the lessons at MU (n = 69) and WU (n = 109) which include both Likert-scale and open-ended responses in order to capture students� perceptions of the lesson and macroethics in general. Responses for each of the open-ended questions were read through and inductively coded by the first and second authors. After an introductory pass through the responses, the researchers met together to review their initial codes, discuss similarities and differences across student responses, and ask clarifying questions about their interpretations of the responses (Charmaz, 2006; Chun Tie et al., 2019). The researchers then developed a shared list of focused codes to encapsulate their analyses of student responses and began defining their initial codebook. Details concerning the development of the macroethics lesson, its most recent implementation, reflections of the lesson, and future implications are presented in the poster. Results of student surveys exploring feedback from the lesson, reflections of macroethical content in their own education, and perceptions of macroethical topics in aerospace engineering are also reported. From both surveyed populations, the majority of student respondents stated that they enjoyed our lesson and would like to have macroethics lessons in the future. Initial qualitative themes that emerged from the open-ended survey data showed that students have varied levels of awareness about macroethical issues, some demonstrating acceptance of the current state of the aerospace industry and others demonstrating resistance with a desire to change the industry. These results will be used to refine future iterations of the macroethics lesson and inform teaching practices of instructors. Our overarching research goal is to restructure aerospace engineering curricula to incorporate macroethics education throughout students' entire undergraduate careers, and this intervention is a stepping stone toward changing classroom ‘cultural spaces’ (Cech, 2013). Integrating discussions of power within technical aerospace courses draws engineering out of a positivist and meritocratic mindset and can help move toward a reconstruction of science and engineering that is founded in justice.