Ethics is a disempowered subject in the engineering curriculum

Power, as enacted in educational practices, is a critical issue that shapes all aspects of engineering education. Yet, there is little research within engineering education on how power manifests itself in what we teach and how we teach it. In this paper we use engineering ethics education as an exemplar to interrogate how power tacitly influences the practice of engineering ethics education. To infer the status of engineering ethics as an academic subject we examine, theorize, and elaborate on two aspects of power: (1) the internal power relations affecting the education of engineering ethics and how they manifest within engineering institutions, and (2) the exerting power of key external actors in and ways in which they impact engineering ethics education. Our methodological approach relies on autoethnographic data rooted in the perspective of the three authors. The autoethnographic cases are grounded in the authors’ own teaching and research practices in engineering ethics education set in the US, Irish and Dutch context. We perform a cross-comparative analysis to reflect further on the impact of power relations on ethics as an academic subject and make recommendations for engineering ethics education research and practice.