This work in progress research paper describes how three theoretical frameworks - funds of knowledge, community cultural wealth, and cultural and social capital - have been used in engineering and science education research. It also highlights the small sample of prior work focused on bridging or combining these frameworks. This paper concludes by describing a systemic scoping review that is underway to compare the research contexts, definitions, and measures used in science or engineering education studies which employ one or more of these frameworks.

This research-to-practice full paper presents a series of brief engineering ethics case studies, all inspired by actual incidents recounted during interviews with early career engineers. Current ABET accreditation requirements include ethics-related outcomes for engineering graduates, and most engineering professional societies and employers maintain their own ethics codes. Yet we have limited knowledge about what kinds of ethical situations and issues are faced by practicing engineers, both in general and during early career phases. More nuanced understandings about the ethical dimensions of engineering work could inform training interventions designed to better prepare engineering graduates for workplace realities. This paper aims to bridge research and practice by presenting a series of brief case studies covering a variety of ethical situations encountered by early career engineers. The case studies are adapted from interviews conducted with a stratified sample of 29 technical professionals, all with at least one degree in engineering and 1–3 years of full-time work experience. The interviews were carried out as part of a larger mixed-methods research study investigating how engineering students and early career professionals perceive and experience ethics, social responsibility, and related concerns. The case studies presented in this paper were intentionally selected and developed to reflect different job roles and industry settings, as well as diverse ethical issues encountered by our participants. We present cases that reflect more commonplace or everyday situations that are “microethical” in nature, i.e., involving localized interactions among individual professionals. We also include some suggested scaffolds and resources for instructors seeking to use such cases in their teaching. We intend that this paper will be relevant and useful for instructors who want to bring early career ethics cases into their courses, as well as for those wishing to write short ethics case studies.

This paper uses the critical incident technique to analyze how early career engineers experience ethics in the workplace. Our results build off a previously developed framework that categorizes critical incidents related to professional engineering ethics, but we expand the framework to address its gaps. Though there was significant overlap between our findings and the existing framework in the types of critical incidents reported by participants, in some cases the severity of a negative ethical experience was not captured by existing categories, especially when describing sexual harassment in the workplace. Many incidents also required multiple categories to accurately describe them as opposed to a single overarching descriptor. Additionally, we observed a connection between personal morality and professional ethics that was present in some critical incidents. Our observations suggest that similar types of critical incidents related to ethics may often be experienced by engineers, but more work needs to be done to expand the classification of these situations and better understand how engineers develop ethics-related competencies, especially early in their careers and in a workplace context.

Engineering education is widely perceived as focusing entirely on difficult technical analysis at the exclusion of consideration for the social contexts associated with such work. However, in reality, engineering practice is concerned with defining and solving problems which are both technical and social in nature and which require professional engineers to understand the complex connections between technical and social considerations. In recent years, there have been efforts across a number of research projects and curriculum development efforts to integrate sociotechnical thinking into students’ engineering courses. This paper leverages one such project to explore the connection between sociotechnical thinking and the development of an engineering identity in students. It presents the results from analysis of student focus groups using inductive coding to explore the connections between students’ beliefs about engineering practice, their perceptions of sociotechnical thinking in their engineering education, and their self-reported engineering identities. We identify and describe four clusters of students which capture the most common interactions between these three dimensions and discuss the implications of these clusters for broadening participation in engineering and engineering education.