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Introducing Ethics to First-year Graduate Students in an Agricultural Engineering Seminar - Jim Steichen, KSU

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No 0629443. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Background

BAE 815, Graduate Seminar in Agricultural Engineering, is a one-credit course in which students practice giving presentations relevant to their field of research. All graduate students in our department attend. Even though our students are assessed by, and typically perform well on, the ethics portion of the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, our department has never offered formal training in ethics. My goal was to introduce an intellectual framework that could be used to guide ethical thinking and decision-making. | Implementation

Implementation

I initially used two class periods to present and discuss the frameworks for ethical decision-making. Later in the semester, I devoted two additional classes to ethics. During these, I emphasized ethics in a more applied context by using case studies as examples; I also presented smaller amounts of new theory that related to the earlier class periods. I gave one written assignment which involved making a decision based on a case study.

| Student Performance

Student Performance

Students performed very well on the assignment. Eight students earned A’s, and one student earned a B. In their assignments, students correctly identified the consequences of following the ethical route, and they seemed to identify very strongly with the graduate students who were part of the case study.

| Reflections

Reflections

Overall, I was pleased with the level of engagement and the level of performance of my students. The case study worked extremely well for this class, largely because it was a situation presented in the context of graduate study and therefore something to which they could relate.

Most of my international students came from places where the professor is held in high esteem and authority; in America, many students see their professors in a less hierarchical light. This diversity in perspectives provided ample fodder for group discussions and demonstrated to me how the analysis of ethical scenarios can be interpreted very differently depending on the cultural context. | Summary

Project Summary

An agricultural engineering professor uses lectures, discussions, and a case study/response to incorporate ethics into a graduate seminar that included many visiting international students. Cultural perspectives yielded rich discussions about the case study.