Supporting Shared Responsibility for Integrating Ethics into Science and Technology Education

To complement previous research on the top-down inclusion of ethics training within engineering programs, this Innovative Practice Work in Progress paper describes a supplementary strategy acknowledging and supporting ethics training as a shared responsibility. As science and technology have ethical impact, accreditation bodies have in the past decades mandated the inclusion of ethics in STEM education. However, the implementation of ethics education is fraught with obstacles. Through a case study of a Faculty-wide effort to support shared responsibility for ethics training, the pros and cons of an institutionally embedded ethics approach are discussed. It is argued that such an approach can provide a rooted base that can also serve to comply with more formal ethics evaluations, by strengthening a view of ethics as craft, acknowledging subject teachers as ethics ambassadors, reforming the hidden curriculum, and depoliticizing institutional politics.