Courage and Creativity: The Innovation of Ethics in Science and Engineering

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At a recent EESE Program PI meeting, educators from across science and engineering expressed frustration with the way in which ethics is perceived by STEM undergraduate and graduate students, who seem to view it as a constraint or punitive, something that stands in the way of creativity and innovation. The PI argues that constraining behavior (don't cheat, don't falsify data) is only one of the roles ethics plays in science and engineering; another is as a creative and generative force that contributes to the development of new knowledge. In this project the PI's goal is to address this seeming contradiction, by building and disseminating new understandings on the role of formal and informal ethical inquiry in science and engineering as an essential catalyst of new discoveries from the industrial revolution through modern times. To this end the PI has assembled a team drawn from the domains of film, theater and television, information studies, and science and technology studies, and which also includes working media artists. They will harness their diverse perspectives to jointly develop a set of case studies centered around original documentary film shorts, which will be gathered in an accessible Web portal. These multimedia educational materials, including interviews, location footage, and motion graphics, will be the first to use professional media to tell stories about the creative power of ethical debate, and will impart a new, positive and generative perspective to undergraduate and graduate STEM ethics training. Broader Impacts: Online and video media are key ways of engaging students. High production values (i.e., careful research, professional screenwriting, and compelling motion graphics) will not only engage the target student audience, but are necessary to convey the complexity of the selected topics. In addition to the curricular materials, the project will contribute methodological experience in the creation of multimedia and video content using ethics-focused approaches, which the PI will document and share in order to encourage educators and STEM researchers to pursue similar studies of ethics as a catalyst for innovation. The PI recognizes that the project format provides an opportunity to highlight the contributions of diverse and traditionally under-represented communities to ethical inquiry in science and engineering in a unique and highly visible way, and he plans to carefully consider questions of representation during selection and production of the case studies.