COMET - Comprehensive Ethics Teaching for Engineering and Design students
COMET is a two-year research project funded by the 4TU.Centre for Engineering Education. The project focuses on the future of engineering ethics education at TU Delft. It is both retrospective and prospective: looking back at the successes and challenges from the last 20 years of integrating ethics into the curriculum at TU Delft, and identifying and proposing best practices for ethics education going forward. Researchers Janna van Grunsven, Taylor Stone and Lavinia Marin are involved in the project.
Ethical dimensions
The ways in which products, services and infrastructures are designed, made, used, and maintained tend to have far-reaching individual, socio-political, and ecological ramifications. This means that the decisions made by engineers are often not only technical but also ethical in nature. As such, it is essential that engineering education properly reflects this and that engineers are trained in their education to become reflectively aware of the ethical dimensions of their work. Van Grunsven: âFortunately, more and more engineering education programmes have started to embrace ethics education as an essential feature of engineering and design curricula, with TU Delft as one of the undeniable front-runners in this areaâ. By itself, this trend is one to be welcomed. However, with the growing awareness that ethics should play a key role in engineering education comes also the challenge of determining exactly how engineering ethics education should be designed and taught. How will engineering students develop the moral sensitivity, creativity, and decision-making skills to take up the social, environmental, and political issues that they will be required to address, solve, or at least work within? What types of educational materials, in terms of form and content, best prepare engineering students for the ethical challenges they will face in their chosen professions? In other words, what are the âbest practicesâ of engineering ethics education? âOur two-year post-doctoral research project, aims to answer these questions', says Van Grunsven.
About COMET
The project consists of three phases:
1. Laying a theoretical foundation through an overview of the state-of-the-art research on engineering ethics and engineering ethics education;
2.Developing our own tripartite framework for thinking about best practices in engineering ethics education, based on the establishment of three distinct but interrelated domains of ethical reflection important for the engineer (reflection on oneâs practical identity as an engineer, reflection on the structural-systemic context of the engineering practice, and reflection on the ethical impact of engineering activities, i.e. products, artifacts, designs);
3. Offering practical recommendations stemming from our theoretical model â at the level of both form and content â for teaching engineering ethics at TU Delft.
The research team
Dr. Lavinia Marin, Dr. Taylor Stone and Dr. Janna van Grunsven all work at TU Delftâs Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. They teach and do research on ethical issues that emerge in engineering and design contexts. In the fall of 2019 they began working on the 4TU.CEE funded research project on best practices for engineering ethics education. âThough the project is still in the early stages we have already submitted one article for publication in Advances in Engineering Educationâ, Van Grunsven remarks. The article is co-authored with Prof. Neelke Doorn and Prof. Sabine Roeser and entitled âHow to Teach Engineering Ethics? A Retrospective and Prospective Sketch of the TU Delft Approach.â The research team also conducted empirical research in the form of a focus group, in which they gathered insights on the challenges of teaching engineering ethics from a wide range of engineering ethics lecturers and professors from a host of different engineering programmes across the globe. The results are now being analysed. âWe are currently working on a theoretical paper on the question âWhat is Engineering Ethics?â and on a practical paper that proposes a new pedagogical exercise that they term âa value-genealogy of technologyâ and which, we suspect, might prove effective for engaging engineers in the ethical dimensions of their workâ, concludes Van Grunsven.
For more information contact Janna van Grunsven Â