Abstract / Summary
STEM Proficiency is a research and teaching intitiative to promote and leverage non-technical skills already inherent in STEM professions. Most important among those skills are communicating expertise and normative justification.
Education in STEM Proficiency would:
- hone non-technical skills which are a catalyst for problem-solving, collaboration and innovation
- enhance the reflective and socially responsive character of STEM problem-solving
- meet ABET accreditation, and teach values sought by professional bodies, through a more integrated approach
The non-technical skills of STEM Proficiency will be essential for the successful solving of next generation grand challenges (global scale and existential).
The How-Problem
In my 7 years of teaching engineering ethics at Wichita State, and a decade of teaching the history and philosophy of science before that, I have come to think differently about the teaching of ethics in STEM contexts.
It is important to think about all those things Science and Engineering ethics has always been concerned with: namely, all of the ways in which society can be impacted by changes brought about through STEM, or changes in STEM itself. With new technologies, capabilities, and practices there are aspects of safety, health, well-being, justice, and responsibility which demand careful and thorough consideration.
Regarding engineering specifically, the profession has an obligation to promote the ethical consideration of society level concerns like whistle blowing, health and safety, and fair and responsible practices. Accreditation of engineering education programs requires these considerations. Licensing bodies require these considerations.
The question is: how to best incorporate these considerations in to training students for a career in STEM?
The answer I’m proposing is a program I call STEM proficiency. STEM Proficiency is a research and teaching intitiative to enhance the character and capacities of STEM graduates and professionals. STEM proficiency aims at equipping next generation problem-solvers with the non-technical skills they’ll need to successfully meet coming grand challenges.
Rather than teaching ethics as an add-on to an engineering program, the innovation of STEM proficiency is to leverage expertise which, though it’s non-technical, is nevertheless inherent to engineering. That expertise is made up of skills needed to articulate and solve problems in STEM contexts, and includes abilities in explanation, communicating expertise, prediction and, most importantly, normative justification.
No real world problem has a unique or perfect solution. (By real world problem I mean any problem whose solution must be realized as a physical construction outside of a laboratory or artificial context.) There will be many technically possible ways to solve any given problem, many physically possible solutions. The physical constraints on how something may be achieved will not fully determine a solution.
At the same time, each possible technical solution will have advantages and disadvantages with regard to a vast range of considerations and values. Stakeholders in a solution may care about practical values like time or budget constraints, or aesthetics, risk, justice, ecology, and many other considerations beyond what is standardly thought of as the ethics of STEM.
No solution can satisfy all of these constraints equally well. Every STEM solution put forward for a real world problem is therefore technically under-constrained, but non-technically over-constrained. Every STEM solution put forward for a real world problem requires choosing which solution is best among a range of technically possible but less than perfect options. Making a choice about what is best is making a normative choice. Which means that all STEM graduates are required to make, and should be able to justify, normative judgments, informed by technical expertise, as an inherent part of their chosen career.
Coming soon: Part II: How humanities and philosophy?
WSUPhilosophy 