GILEE: Graduate Interdisciplinary Liberal Engineering Ethics
In this project, a team of engineering science, engineering, humanities and business educators is developing a graduate interdisciplinary liberal engineering ethics curriculum, known as GILEE. It addresses how issues of engineering ethics and cultural identities are necessarily intertwined within a globalized workplace and has a four-prong approach: 1) develop a course for graduate students and seniors interested in transitioning to graduate school, which will consist of various ethics training modules; 2) conduct a two-track summer training workshop, one for students and the other for faculty; 3) establish a seminar series in which scholars, practitioners, and senior graduate students speak on matters related to engineering ethics; and 4) include ethical issues in the Ph.D. preliminary examination and require graduate students to present ethics learning modules as part of the examination. The team includes partners from Virginia Tech, North Carolina A&T State University, and University of Illinois at Chicago. Test institutions include Politecnico di Milano, Italy and Jadavpur University, India. The evaluation and assessment plan includes both formative and summative evaluations.
The GILEE curriculum is grounded in the relevant research literatures of engineering education, science and technology studies, philosophy, and business management and builds a community of graduate students from engineering, humanities, and business who better understand each other's disciplines and are thus better prepared to be productive and collaborative members of an increasingly diverse society and its workforce.
Broader impacts are both national and international for graduate students in science and engineering. It offers a method to integrate mentoring programs, infrastructure development, faculty capacity building, and graduate-student involvement in program development.
