Developing novel practices of somatic learning to enhance empathie perspective-taking for ethical reasoning and engineering design

Board 12: Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division: Examining the Relationships Between How Students Construct Stakeholders and the Ways Students Conceptualize Harm from Engineering Design

“…As a result, instructors must create classrooms where students have both the time and resources to engage with a diversity of perspectives. While some efforts in engineering education have started exploring ways in which to scaffold perspective-taking in the context of ethics and of engineering design (Jaycox et. al.…”

The Dynamics of Perspective-taking in Discussions on Socio-technical Issues

“…Within engineering ethics education research, most of the work on perspective-taking has focused on developing tools and environments to engage students in perspective taking [6], [7], [15]- [17]. Practices such as role playing in the context of engineering ethics courses can provide students with opportunities to understand someone else's perspective.…”

“…Here, flexible perspective-taking is counted as evidence of the advanced "postconventional" stage of judgment. Jaycox et al [7] and May & Luth [20] explore whether ethics experiences enable students to engage in greater perspective-taking using survey items to infer perspective-taking. However, there is a paucity of research on understanding the real time conversational dynamics of how engineers or engineering students engage with socio-technical issues, whether and how they consider the perspectives of multiple stakeholders when talking about complex scenarios (such as that of Keystone XL pipeline), and on modeling the socio-cognitive processes underlying their perspective-taking.…”

“…For example, engineers from USA might be required to understand the perspective of local communities in China who are dealing with the negative impact of toxic waste from solar cell manufacturing plants so that USA's alternative energy needs don't end up trumping the needs of another community for access to clean air, water, and soil. Thus perspective-taking is at the heart of many engineering ethics dilemmas [7]. In the lack of such perspective-taking, it is much more likely that the interests of those who have lesser access to conventional means of power will again get marginalized, and it is also likely that the solutions that emerge will be brittle -in the sense of being out of harmony with the local context and thus over time being discarded, or disused [9].…”

A Principlist Approach for Thinking About the Social Impacts of Engineering

“…When the project required them to actually engage with community partners' perspectives they were literally quite far from their own worldview so the framework of common principles and a familiar reasoning process enabled them to more confidently and effectively engage in the conversations. 41 While this service learning example did not involve experimental design or controlled study of a positive impact of RP on communication competence, others have reported the challenges of engineering students in their communications skills with diverse stakeholders. Leydens and Lucena 42 have reported on the difficulty in communicating, particularly with listening, with stakeholders in a cultural context different from their own.…”