Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

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incorporate into engineering education, we didn’t find much literature suggesting what
actions to take in order to demonstrate care. Therefore, it is still not clear what
care/caring looks like in practice.
d) Care as professional duties
Kardon (2005) summarized “ standard of care” in engineering into four duties: 1) the duty
to have that degree of learning and skill ordinarily possessed by reputable professionals;
2) the duty to use the care and skill ordinarily used in like cases by reputable members of
his or her profession practicing in the same or similar locality under similar
circumstances; 3) the duty to use reasonable diligence and his or her best judgment in the
exercise of professional skills and in the application of learning; 4) the duty to make effort
to accomplish the purpose for which he/she is employed. Kardon (2005) argued that once
an engineer had failed to meet the standard of care, he/she was professionally negligent.
e) Caring as a feminine approach in engineering
Starobin, Jackson, Darrow & Laanan (2010) interviewed nine community college STEM
faculty, administrators, and program coordinators who participated in a project, aiming at
increasing the participation of women and underrepresented populations in STEM. It was
found that engineering was characterized as a caring and helping profession when
advising female students.
“When the ladies or women come to my office and show the interest of sometime concern
because this is a man field they kind of worry or are concern and we talk the women
science usually is caring, nurture so we talk about what the engineering can help people or
can in the field of helping.”
“We’ll talk to the students or potential students about what engineers do but we recharacterize
science and engineering somewhat into helping how, how engineers help
people how engineers make a difference in the world, both on an individual level and a
general societal level too. This seems to ring a very strong chord with women in particular.
So that’s the one of the big messages that we give them and so we try to provide examples
of how engineers help people and what a career might look like and also what an
educational path would look like through those…”
This finding is similar to what was found in other fields, where caring was reported as a
feminine approach to ethics. Therefore, connecting engineering with caring might attract
more female engineering students (Haws, 2001). The result from Christy, Lima & Cauble
(1999)’s research actually supports this argument. In their study, 32 female professors in
Biological/Agricultural (and related) Engineering (BAE) were asked to give their opinions
in essay format on why BAE was attracting and retaining more women compared to other
engineering disciplines. Some responses were:
“Areas where there is a higher percentage of women engineers usually are related to
somewhat of a nurturing, healing, or caring type technology such as environmental,
biomedical or food sciences.”
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011