Bombaerts, Gunter

Kovacs, Helena

Martin, Diana

Tormey, Roland

English

UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC

50th Annual Conference in September 20222313Workshop SIGrkshop SIGGunter Bombaerts, Helena Kovacs, Diana Martin and Roland TormeyHow can y u con ribute to the social responsibility of your unive sity’s education? - 10.5821/conference-9788412322262.1466doi:10.5821/conference-9788412322262.1466How can you contribute to the social responsibility of your university’s education?  Gunter Bombaerts, Helena Kovacs, Diana Martin, Roland Tormey Keywords: responsibility, ethics, teacher, university, eco-system  In this SEFI ethics SIG-workshop, we actively engage with the question: “How can you contribute to the social responsibility of your university’s education?”  This is an important question for university staff. First, universities become (and see themselves) as increasingly important players to contribute to the sustainable development goals. Their missions [1]–[3] and strategies [4] broaden to more research, entrepreneurship and social responsibility. From the perspective of being recognized as important actors in the quintuple helix of innovation [5], (technical) university eco-system collaborations become increasingly co-creative, including complex interactions between political, economic, and education systems, natural environment and knowledge creation [6]. The technical universities’ education also becomes increasingly intertwined with the eco-system partners, resulting in adapting curricula [7] and new and flexible [8] formats for ethics courses [9] such as research-based, community-based or challenge-based learning. Second, in this transition, teachers change inevitably from purely internal staff to societal actors [10]. Willingly or unwillingly, you as an individual teacher get a more pronounced societal role, as an agent of social change (e.g. [11]).  This means a growing realization that, in the language of Paulo Freire, “Education is politics…when a teacher realizes that he or she is a politician too, the teacher has to ask, What kind of politics am I doing in the classroom?  That is, in favor of whom am I being a teacher?” [3:46].    If we approach this from the responsibility angle, Whitbeck’s definition “exercise of judgment and care to achieve or maintain a desirable state of affairs” [4:159] can be a starting point here. As Fore and Hess note while introducing their five-sided framework of ethical becoming, “rules and codes found in discipline-specific standards are undoubtedly important, [but] insufficient by themselves for moral inquiry and ethical judgement” [5:1355]. The reflection of the impact of education to the university’s responsibility then requires a focus on the actual context and social practices [15] and a broader perspective on all involved (students, teachers, university, eco-system) [16].  For the session, we propose the following agenda: 1. Short introduction of the context of the workshop 2. Break-out groups • What is your role in the university? (Ethics) teacher? (Educational) manager?  What do you care about”? What do you want to change or influence? Do you focus on the classroom activities? Or do you reflect on how your activities (teaching, research, …) have a broader impact? 50th Annual Conference in September 20222314How do you judge things as a desirable state of affairs? How does ethics come into play? What can you “exercise”? What can you do? What is your agency or influence? How is it limited (university, other contexts)? Do you want more influence?  • Who can or should you involve in co-constructing the educational agenda and reaching educational goals? • How do you evaluate your influence? Student satisfaction or student learning? Do you also use input from other partners? 3. Plenum discussion, in which we bring together the different inputs and have an overall discussion.  References: [1] L. Fuchs and G. Bombaerts, “Responsibility in University Ecosystems and Challenge Based Learning,” in 2022 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), Mar. 2022, pp. 1248–1253. doi: 10.1109/EDUCON52537.2022.9766462. [2] L. Fuchs, C. Cuevas-Garcia, P. Mottl, and G. Bombaerts, “Alliance Formation and Moral Reflexivity:  Towards Responsible European Engineering Universities?,” presented at the Grand Challenges in Engineering Education, Uppsala, Sweden, 2022. [3] D. A. Martin and G. Bombaerts, “Enacting socio-technical responsibility through Challenge Based Learning,” presented at the Grand Challenges in Engineering Education, Uppsala, Sweden, 2022. [4] Bombaerts, Gunter et al., “Comparing institutional strategies for engineering ethics education in regional, national and European contexts,” 2021. Accessed: Jul. 15, 2022. [Online]. Available: https://research.tue.nl/nl/publications/6932c138-d4cc-455d-b61a-cfda7d5889b5 [5] E. G. Carayannis, T. D. Barth, and D. F. Campbell, “The Quintuple Helix innovation model: global warming as a challenge and driver for innovation,” Journal of innovation and entrepreneurship, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1–12, 2012. [6] D. A. Martin, E. Conlon, and B. Bowe, “A Multi-level Review of Engineering Ethics Education: Towards a Socio-technical Orientation of Engineering Education for Ethics,” Sci Eng Ethics, vol. 27, no. 5, p. 60, Aug. 2021, doi: 10.1007/s11948-021-00333-6. [7] R. Tormey, I. LeDuc, S. Isaac, C. Hardebolle, and I. V. Cardia, “The formal and hidden curricula of ethics in engineering education,” in 43rd annual SEFI conference, 2015, no. CONF. [8] G. Bombaerts, K. I. Doulougeri, A. Spahn, N. M. Nieveen, and B. Pepin, “The course structure dilemma: Striving for Engineering students’ motivation and deep learning in an ethics and history course,” in Proceedings of the 46th SEFI Annual Conference, 2018, pp. 79–87. [9] G. Bombaerts, K. Doulougeri, S. Tsui, E. Laes, A. Spahn, and D. A. Martin, “Engineering students as co-creators in an ethics of technology course,” Science and engineering ethics, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 1–26, 2021. [10] D. A. Martin, G. Bombaerts, and A. Johri, “Ethics is a disempowered subject in the engineering curriculum,” in Proceedings of the SEFI 2021 Conference: Blended Learning in Engineering Education: challenging, enlightening–and lasting?, 2021, p. 357. 50th Annual Conference in September 20222315[11] D. Bourn, “Teachers as agents of social change,” International Journal of Development Education and Global Learning, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 63–77, 2016. [12] I. Shor and P. Freire, “What is the ‘dialogical method’ of teaching?,” Journal of education, vol. 169, no. 3, pp. 11–31, 1987. [13] C. Whitbeck, Ethics in engineering practice and research. Cambridge University Press, 2011. [14] G. A. Fore and J. L. Hess, “Operationalizing ethical becoming as a theoretical framework for teaching engineering design ethics,” Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 1353–1375, 2020. [15] H. Kovacs, J. D. Zufferey, R. Tormey, and P. Jermann, “Teaching under lockdown: the change in the social practice of teaching,” High Educ, May 2022, doi: 10.1007/s10734-022-00863-3. [16] G. Bombaerts, D. A. Martin, S. Junaid, and R. Tormey, “Coaching engineering ethics education research: 48th SEFI Annual Conference,” SEFI 48th Annual Conference Engaging Engineering Education, Proceedings, p. 1410, 2020.  

How can you contribute to the social responsibility of your university’s education?

https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/2117/389681/1/p2313-p2315.pdf

How can you contribute to the social responsibility of your university’s education?

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC