Ethical Issues Related to Engineering Service Learning

Service learning within engineering education is increasing in amount and visibility. The rapid growth of Engineers without Borders (working internationally), and the EPICS program (working domestically), demonstrate this trend. There has been much work dealing with the legitimacy of service learning in engineering education. However, there has been less work dealing with ethical issues involved with engineering service learning. While there are ethical issues related to any engineering project, this paper concentrates on ethical issues inherent in the service learning approach. Two of these issues are described below. One issue is the quality and safety of the design. Objects are being designed by people who are not yet professional engineers. The professors who supervise the work need to be very careful in checking the design to ensure its safety. There is also a legal issue. Many states require that anything designed for public use must be supervised by a registered professional engineer. Many faculty members are not registered and cannot legally supervise such work. A second issue is how the design relates to the local community. In traditional engineering design the client is clearly identified and the engineer can work with her to make sure her wishes are carried out in the design. Often engineering service learning is done with a local non-profit agency or local government. In both cases they claim to represent the needs and desires of the local community that will be served by the project. The university needs to make sure that this project is really needed and wanted by the people it is designed to serve. Therefore, the project really has two clients, the local agency and the local population to be served. This complicates the design process and raises ethical issues if these two groups are not in total agreement. Proceedings of the 2008 ASEE Gulf-Southwest Annual Conference The University of New Mexico—Albuquerque Copyright © 2008, American Society for Engineering Education