Why We Should Supplement Ethics with Citizenship: Why We Should Supplement Ethics with Citizenship
Pages 68 - 73
Abstract
Over the past three decades it has become increasingly common to include social and professional issue topics within undergraduate computing programs. A decade ago, a consensus had emerged around best practices in teaching these topics: namely by covering a professional code of conduct along with a handful of ethical theories and then applying them to computing or workplace dilemmas and choices. Yet despite the successful wide-scale inclusion of ethics instruction within most computing programs, the perception persists that the societal harms of computing remain undiminished. This paper argues that ethics was never the answer to this problem. Addressing the social consequences of computing requires recognizing that computing is deeply enmeshed in political issues, and that the route to addressing this in our curricula is to integrate political topics within them. We can learn effective ways for doing so by making use of pedagogical approaches already pioneered within digital literacy and citizenship education which prioritize questions around justice, equity, and participation. These approaches also focus on engendering critical perspectives towards the students’ digital and non-digital ecosystems as well as encouraging democratic activism and civic engagement with their communities. These citizenship approaches can help our computing curricula better achieve the goals that initially motivated the inclusion of ethics: to help our students play a part in constructing a better world.
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Index Terms
- Why We Should Supplement Ethics with Citizenship: Why We Should Supplement Ethics with Citizenship
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DOI:10.1145/3582515
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