Abstract:

Our objectives are fundamentally to contribute to the education of the engineer as an organizational socially attentive and responsible element, able to understand and measure the consequences of his actions, conscientious of his professional decisions. This simple formulation, however, hides a background of complexity that does not become easy to solve. Students develop an ethical consciousness, and ethics cannot be fragmented, but one cannot have ethical thinking only in certain contexts and circumstances. In a world of mobility and dynamic relations, using communications networks, the engineer is exposed to crescent integration of information, as well as increasing speeds of communications and transactions. Two very strong reasons to develop an ethical mind. Today, more than ever, we do not know what the future career (is that a carrier? or young engineers just jump around crescent attractive jobs) of our students will be. So, what we are trying to in this paper is to raise awareness and an ability to reason, taking into account ethics for the student as a whole in his life, always in a structured attitude. More than thinking in the content of a course we are traveling in ways in which the content is a consequence of the course practices. Content is structured in a bottom-up attitude, within a constructivist mindset, never being dogmatic.

Introduction:
Is there a unique ethics for all persons and for all situations, in all spaces, from all sides? The question is not even the most relevant, but for the sake of curiosity will that be truth, or not? As usual, good questions are simple but also rise a level of complexity, a level in which answers are not easy, and surely not absolute. In our view with the lenses of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), ethics is an immutable mobile that changes and adapts to the contexts without actually changing, not even loosing meanings according to its basic conceptual foundations. To understand the analysis we want to perform, we need to lightly refer some central concepts used by Actor-Network Theory.

The Bologna approach, design and methods:
Rather than adopting problem solving as a model for theorizing learning processes in engineering practices and education, researchers on this field should view theory construction as sense making (Astley, 1985). In our approach, valid for students, teachers, professional practitioners, and technologies we would translate theory construction into conciliation, as we need to integrate what and why, that is problem formulation, and problematization in ANT terms (Callon, 1986). These two processes reshape each other, in the sense they construct alternative realities that trigger innovation, they ‘socialize’ (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) between themselves and create knowledge. These alternative realities constructed by this “socialization of things” can be addressed as ongoing extensions and detours in a pathway of evolution. We use the term socialization, coined by Nonaka, in an ANT way, that is, we are interested in the play of hybrid actors, not only human.

Methodology:
We discuss in this section the generic methodology used in conducting the research, our inquiry and then the concrete methodology for the creation of a Bologna curricular unit. We use a narrative strategy in an interpretive approach constituted by a storytelling methodology (Kellam, 2015).

Keywords:

Ethics, Engineering Education, immutable mobile, obligatory passage point, border object.