Engineering Ethics as Storylines: Emulating the moral imperative of Aboriginal stories

As engineering educators, we are providing guidance for students about how to learn, what to learn and how to understand their learning so as to continue to develop these skills over their lifetime.

As engineers we have the moral imperative of sustainable practice, of doing no harm on a long term scale. We cannot teach this unless we come to our work with a firm footing in the landscape we know and love, and a story in our head of our purpose. A story that grows as we work on projects in our discipline, as we understand the complexity of the systems we work with and that retains a basic narrative, embellished with new locations and experiences, that are tied together to retain the complexity of systems thinking.