I can’t teach ethics, I’m not an ethicist: Transforming STEM ethics education begins with engaging faculty as ethical subjects
Saturday, May 20, 3:00 – 4:30 pm

Workshop Objective: Participants will (1) engage in sample activities used as part of a faculty learning community (FLC) intended to promote the teaching and integration of ethics and Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) across two STEM departments, and (2) consider opportunities/contexts for adaptation in their own faculty development efforts.

Workshop Overview: The workshop introduces and simulates aspects of an institutional transformation project centered on fostering sustainable changes in and departmental support for STEM ethics curriculum design and delivery. Participants will engage in sample activities used in the project to support shifts in perspective about ethics, reflection and CEL among participating faculty and will consider opportunities/contexts for adaptation in their own faculty development efforts.

Workshop Plan
The Contexts and Stakes [30 MIN]
• 10 minutes – Welcome, Introductions & Session Goals
• 10 minutes – Integrated Community-Engaged and Ethical Reflection (ICELER) Project
• Why is STEM Ethics critical? Here we will depict what’s at stake with a concerted focus on the quintuple innovation helix.
• Why transformation and not training? This project goes beyond codes and cases with the goal of transforming STEM ethics education through practice-oriented ethics and faculty engagement.
• What is the ICELER Project? Here we will describe key facets of the project, including design features of the Faculty Learning Community (FLC), our Theory of Change, and project impacts.
• 10 minutes – Stand and Declare Activity – Participants will declare what they perceive as (1) Good Teaching and (2) Critical Reflection

We Teach who We Are [60 MIN]
• 5 minutes – We teach who we are – Scholarly Identity Mapping (SIM) set up
• 15 minutes – Working independently participants complete parts of SIM – values mapping, the power to name, and identifying public purposes
• 15 minutes – Pair. Share.
• 20 minutes – Large Group Report Out – Key Insights and Implications Use/Adaptation.
• 5 minutes – Closing and Next Steps

Workshop Description: The workshop introduces and simulates aspects of an institutional transformation project centered on fostering sustainable changes in and departmental support for STEM ethics curriculum design and delivery. For the last five years, we have collaborated with faculty members in two IUPUI departments (Biomedical Engineering and Earth Sciences) using a Faculty Learning Community (FLC) as our intervention. We hypothesized that by creating an environment where faculty examined their ethical values and the ways values are nested within their instructional practices, faculty would experience a shift in perspective. This shift would result in a greater openness among a critical mass of departmental faculty to try civic and social pedagogies like community engaged learning. And ultimately, this shift would positively influence the ethical development of students. Specifically, during the FLC participants engaged in guided reflection on their scholarly identities as a site for the construction and evolution of the ethical self. They also pursued strategies to Integrate Community Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection (ICELER) in extant courses, and (3) identified strategies to sustain change through collective reflection and goals setting using an engaged department rubric.

Among the premises of ICELER were that 1) ethics is not an individual but a relational practice, including how one is in relationship with oneself as well as others; 2) teaching, like research and service, are value-laden moral practices; and 3) faculty do not need to be ethicists to facilitate ethics learning but they do need to be conscious of their own ethical experiences and ethical practices. An FLC was used as a vehicle (1) to support faculty as they developed a critical awareness of their ethical values (both personal and scholarly) and the public purposes of their disciplinary activities, (2) to facilitate course and program level curriculum change, (3) to spawn community building within and across departments in relation to ethics, (4) to develop an inquiry space that prompted disorienting dilemmas (sensu Mezirow) for faculty participants in relation to their own ethical subjectivity and assumptions about ethics learning, and (5) the nature of critical reflection in relation to scientific practice and the relevance of civic rich experiences to STEM curricula.

Alignment with the Conference Theme: Calls to embrace the quadruple or quintuple innovation helix to address the complex challenges facing humanity and planet demand movement beyond reducing ethical instruction to a set of professional codes or the rational exploration of moral quandaries via case studies. Ethical issues within this innovation helix are relational in nature and harken to the need to prepare engineering students for the relational complexity of the ethical issues that they will encounter within their personal, civic, and work lives. The ICELER project represents one effort to promote a relational ethos among STEM faculty by strengthening individual and departmental capacities to integrate ethical theory and community-engaged teaching methods. In this project, we developed a faculty learning community wherein we began with the principle that faculty “teach who they are” (cf. Parker Palmer) aiming to strengthen undergraduate ethics education at a single institution. This workshop will share and build on the faculty learning community successes and challenges.

Presenters
Mary F. Price, Director of Teaching and Learning, The Forum on Education Abroad
Grant A. Fore, Research Associate, STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute, IUPUI
Justin Hess, Assistant Professor, Engineering Education, Purdue University
Elizabeth Sanders, Graduate Research Assistant, Engineering Education, Purdue University
Brandon Sorge, Associate Professor, School of Engineering & Technology, IUPUI
Martin Coleman, Associate Professor, Philosophy, IUPUI