SEFI@work: Irritation to stimulate the development of students’ ethical competences

SEFI@work: Irritation to stimulate the development of students’ ethical competences | The (un)certainty (dis)comfort series from the SEFI Ethics SIG

Date : Jan 17, 15h30-16h30 (CET)

Description:
Engineering students need to develop certain ethical competences in order to fulfil their specific role in sustainable development. However, competence development is not something that can be taught directly, as it relates not only to skills and knowledge, but also to deep personality traits such as attitudes and values. People change these personality traits primarily when they are forced to do so by disruptive experiences.

In teaching, we can make use of this by deliberately provoking disruptive experiences and accompanying students on their turbulent emotional journey in dealing with these experiences. For example, at the Berlin Ethics Lab we have built a project course on “fair mobility” entirely around the principle of irritation to observe the effects on students – with considerable success!

In the webinar, I will present our approach, explain its theoretical foundations and share our initial findings, followed by a hopefully lively discussion on the didactics of ethical literacy.

This workshop is for you if:

• You want ideas on how to trigger competency development in students.
• You want to understand why traditional teaching is insufficient to address key competencies development and what could be done differently.
• You want to connect with other researchers and teachers interested in support engineering students to constructively engage with uncertainty.

Speaker: Ina Peters (M.A.), Berlin Ethics Lab at TU Berlin

Target Audience: Engineering Educators, Engineering Education and Education Sciences PhD Students, Early-career researchers, senior administrators

The (un)certainty (dis)comfort workshop series is a SEFI SIG Ethics project organised by Siara Isaac (EPFL).