This award is for a planning workshop that will address important issues in integrating ethics and value studies more fully into the business, science, and engineering curriculum at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Special attention will be given to the cross-cultural variables affecting professional ethics. Much has already been done to promote integration of ethical studies there, but specific areas still demand more attention. Offering courses in ethics is not enough; ethics classes added on to the existing curriculum give the impression that ethics is merely an afterthought. Rather ways must be found to integrate ethics into the business, science, and engineering curriculum. This involves a different set of challenges that this award will address. For example, it involves not only ethicists teaching ethics to science and engineers, but more importantly involves also science and engineering faculty incorporating ethical case studies into their courses. It also involves consideration of the wider institutional and political culture as well as the differences in cultures within diverse Hispanic populations. The planning workshop will last three days and will involve the participation of science and engineering faculty from the University of Puerto Rico and as well as prominent ethicists. Topics covered in the workshop will be preparing faculty to teach ethics across the curriculum; case selection and cultural implications of teaching ethics; and ethics and research. Areas of emphasis in this planning workshop will be: discussing the feasibility of selecting cases of relevance to other Hispanic groups than just Puerto Ricans; generating measurable outcomes and instruments of evaluation; and involving science and engineering faculty up front in the curriculum design issues, along with applied ethicists and others from the university community.
