Integrating Ethics Education into New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET)

Principal Investigator
Prof. Alex Byrne, Linguistics & Philosophy; Dr. Abby Everett Jaques, Linguistics & Philosophy; Milo Phillips-Brown, Linguistics & Philosophy; Dr. James Magarian, Gordon Engineering Leadership Program; Dr. James Magarian, Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program (GEL), School of Engineering
Fund: d'Arbeloff Fund
Funding Period: AY2020
Department/Lab/Center: Linguistics & Philosophy
Educational Initiative: NEET

In Fall 2016, the Dean, School of Engineering, chartered NEET (New Engineering Education Transformation), a new cross-departmental “project-centric” effort to rethink engineering education. Two NEET pilot project threads, launched in 2017-18, were oversubscribed; currently, there are 131 NEET students. We propose to integrate Ethical Engineering curricula into NEET. We will develop an ethics module for each year in the NEET program. The modules will be practice-focused, teaching students to think directly about ethical decisions in their practice as engineers, and project-based: students will integrate what they’ve learned into their semester- and year-long NEET projects. The goal is to fill the gap of ethics education in NEET with curricula that fits with NEET's innovative pedagogical approach.