Performing ethics of technology: Using improvisational performance-based techniques in engineering ethics education

The paper explores the potential for improvisational techniques used in ethics tutorials with the aim of fostering moral sensitivity. Recently there has been an increased interest in researching how performance-based techniques can foster certain ethical competencies. In ethics education for engineering, role-playing games have been an example of performance-based technique successfully employed to help students understand the complexities of ethical decision-making. However, role-playing games have several limitations because of the rigid structure of the roles and of choices in the script, which may lead students to act detached from the situation. Based on the idea that we need to foster also practice-based skills in engineering ethics education, not solely analytic skills, we have encountered in the previous literature the hypothesis that improvisation games can help students rehearse what it is like to act morally in an engineering situation. To clarify what is the potential of improvisation in engineering ethics education, we observed and helped with designing a course centred entirely on improvisational techniques for engineering and science students. Drawing from this pedagogical experiment, we noticed that improvisational performance-based techniques managed to stimulate the student’s moral sensitivity. This happened by two effects that we named the spectator effect and the shared space of vulnerability effect that we describe in detail. While role-playing has acquired the status of a “classical” exercise in engineering ethics education, improvisation still needs to be adopted by ethics teachers. Through our experiment, we hope to have shown that there is definitely an untapped potential in this kind of exercise for increasing student’s moral sensitivity and engagement, thus making possible an increased moral agency.