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Examining Faculty Barriers and Challenges in Adopting Ethical Pedagogies in Online Environments

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

Innovative, Engaging Pedagogies for Engineering Ethics Education

Tagged Division

Engineering Ethics

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37117

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37117

Download Count

276

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Paper Authors

biography

Samuel Aaron Snyder Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Sam Snyder is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. He received his Bachelors of Science in Materials Science and Engineering in 2017 from Virginia Tech. His current research interests are in engineering ethics education and exploring the relationship between empathy and ethical decision-making.

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biography

Diana Bairaktarova Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Dr. Diana Bairaktarova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. Through real-world engineering applications, Dr. Bairaktarova’s experiential learning research spans from engineering to psychology to learning sciences, as she uncovers how individual performance is influenced by aptitudes, spatial skills, personal interests and direct manipulation of mechanical objects.

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Abstract

Our project examines the challenges and barriers that faculty experience during a major undergraduate curriculum shift at a US research university. As a part of the revised curriculum, faculty are required to include ethical reasoning and/or global awareness as a portion of their program. However, a majority of the faculty involved in the program were not primarily trained in ethics or global education. As a result, many faced institutional barriers and challenges when attempting to incorporate practices and pedagogies into their classroom. With the outbreak of COVID-19 in the past year, students and faculty have had to adapt to online teaching formats which present an additional set of difficulties for faculty in developing ethics and global education pedagogies. To better understand the barriers that faculty are facing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with around 20 faculty across the university. The interviews included discussions of the pedagogies faculty used within their newly designed courses, who faculty interacted with and how they gained the ethical and intercultural competencies, and the challenges faculty faced in redesigning the courses. Preliminary results have found that some of the more common challenges that faculty are facing is the lack of institutional guidance and resources, the lack of support from other faculty, and a lack of time to implement the required changes. Moving forward, we plan to expand this study to reinterview faculty as the program progress and faculty learn more about how to teach in online settings.

Snyder, S. A., & Bairaktarova, D. (2021, July), Examining Faculty Barriers and Challenges in Adopting Ethical Pedagogies in Online Environments Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37117

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