NSF Award
2407301
Engineering projects and technological developments have been at the core of social and economic development globally. A typical underlying assumption is that engineers' work contributes to improving public welfare and protecting and mitigating harm to the natural environment. Consequently, professional codes of ethics integrate such assumptions but do so by relying mostly on incentivizing the conduct of "responsible" engineers towards the public, clients, and peer engineers at the expense of understanding or addressing the broader ethical impact of engineering on society and the public interest. These broad ethical principles do not routinely figure into engineering decision-making. Furthermore, research has shown that engineering students' focus on public welfare declines as they move through their undergraduate education, and that social issues are still remote for the average engineering student. A human rights-based approach to engineering work and education can help address this lack of broad ethical principles in the field, by harmonizing existing engineering work with human rights core principles of distributive justice, participation, consideration of duty bearers, accountability, and indivisibility of rights. This new and innovative approach can equip a new generation of engineering students with knowledge and tools to identify connections between their profession and the well-being of the people and to advance national health, prosperity, and welfare.<br/><br/>Given the dearth of existing systematic evidence of the effectiveness of teaching human rights to engineering students, this project aims to evaluate the effect of pedagogical innovation on changes in student attitudes toward human rights and the societal impact of engineering. The project will employ a quasi-experimental design approach to test the hypothesis that learning modules focused on human rights can positively impact engineering students' attitudes toward human rights and their awareness of the social impact of engineering on society. The research will be carried out by a highly interdisciplinary team including expertise in engineering, human rights, and education. The project will develop, deploy, and evaluate the efficacy of human rights training modules in English and Spanish for integration into engineering courses. Findings from this project are relevant to broader human rights education in the STEM fields of engineering, sciences, and math. This research also stands to impact engineering education in the United States by foregrounding macro-ethical issues in engineering and developing curricula that can be used at scale by colleagues at other institutions who are interested in adopting a human rights approach to engineering education.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
