Making Meaning Together: An Autoethnography Study On Our Role In Ethics Education

Representation of diverse people’s perspectives, cultures, and ideas enriches societies. Equally important for communities to flourish is to have diverse perspectives on what good ethics education is. For 50 years the European Society of Engineering Education (SEFI) has been uniting and supporting engineering educators and researchers from around the globe and particularly from Europe. However, involvement from institutions in Eastern Europe is still very low. To diversify and strengthen the community by bringing perspectives from these countries, we engaged in an autoethnography study to share insights on participation barriers broadly and ethics education, more specifically. We choose autoethnography as this methodology allows researchers not only to share their own experiences but to connect in making meaning of a phenomena and to form a community of practice. The researchers and authors of this paper are representing STEM institutions in three Eastern European countries. Applying an interactionist approach, we engaged in a community of practice group to discuss the current state of the art of ethics education in our own institutions and to talk about the experiences with ethics education, academic integrity, and ethics culture. We collectively selected an appropriate framework and applied that framework to interpret the findings. Transcripts were analysed by all five researchers. The paper and the presentation will be presented together as a narrative story. The goal of this work is to form a community of practice and to create an agenda to engage the newly formed community of practice with the broader SEFI ethics education community.