Making Ethics Education Personal

Accredited engineering programs are required to provide instruction in ethics. A primary goal of ethics education is to develop and improve a student’s ability to recognize situations involving ethical decisions and to encourage development of a personal framework by which to decide what to do. A major challenge in ethics education is to personalize situations that are typical of those that the students will likely encounter. This paper presents techniques that enable a faculty member to act as a facilitator in the discussion of ethics rather than as an instructor.