New Perspectives in Science Education

The modern engineer has an ethical imperative: engineers must “Hold paramount the safety, health and welfare of the public” [1]. How can educators create space for undergraduate engineering students to consider how to answer this call? National accreditation body Engineers Canada mandates that upon graduation, all Canadian undergraduate engineering students must have ability to consider the impact of engineering activities on society, including how engineering interacts within complex social, legal, cultural, and environmental parameters [2]. Furthermore, the Canadian engineering student must graduate with an “ability to apply professional ethics, accountability, and equity” [2]. In the wake of engineering disasters such as the Boeing 737 crisis and the Bhopal tragedy, how might we foster more significant opportunity for engineering students to gain the skills necessary to achieve the accreditors’ mandate? How might we inspire students to gain confidence in their ability to understand and respect others and to practice social responsibility, or as Walther, Miller, and Sochacka suggest, to become an engineer that has “…deep consideration of, and genuine service to, all human and nonhuman stakeholders impacted by engineering” [3]? In this presentation, I examine different strategies for creating opportunity for engineering students to reflect on the ethical imperative of the engineer, and to develop skills that can help students work toward practicing what Xiaofeng Tang calls ‘empathic engineering’ [4]. Building on the work of the aforementioned scholars and drawing from human-centred design methology and humanities-based pedagogy, I will share tactics for incorporating empathy, curiosity, humility, and perspective-taking into engineering curriculum, tactics that aim to equip students with a more robust toolbox for protecting and serving the public and the environment. By the end of the session, attendees should gain understanding of how these tactics can be employed in curriculum (with examples from my Engineering Communication and Design-Driven Innovation graduate engineering courses at the University of Ontario), and why it can be beneficial for engineering students to build capacity for empathy.