Ethics Across the Curriculum: Continuing the Transfer of Technology

Illinois Institute Of Technology, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Teaching ethics across the engineering and science curriculum remains more of an aspiration than a reality at many, perhaps most, colleges and universities. The Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology has developed a successful approach to this subject, with a series of summer workshops for faculty at IIT and elsewhere. This project will transfer to faculty at science and engineering programs at approximately sixty other campuses what IIT has learned about teaching ethics across the curriculum. The project includes: a) an intensive seven-day summer faculty workshop to develop specific materials to use in class and the skills and confidence to use them; b) a required testing of those materials in class at the home institution; and c) an evaluation of the results (a faculty self-report, student assessment, and follow-up questionnaires). Not only will faculty at numerous campuses be taught both to integrate ethics into their own technical courses and how to help other faculty do the same, but their efforts will be tracked and assessed and their best work disseminated nationally.