Teaching

My teaching leverages philosophical material to empower students in engineering and computing to reason ethically about their design choices and business decisions, preparing the next generation of responsible technologists, business leaders, and citizens.

Download my Teaching Dossier

At Cornell

First-Year Engineering Ethics Seminar

Each fall, I teach ethics modules in the first-year seminar (ENGRG 1050) for all new undergraduates in the College of Engineering. These sessions introduce students to ethical reasoning and responsible practice as essential skills for a professional engineer.

Ethical Issues in Engineering Practice

Each spring, I teach an upper-division course on the ethics of professional engineering (ENGRG 3600). The course introduces several frameworks from professional ethics, philosophy, science and technology studies, and feminist theory for thinking about technology, design, and society. Students apply these frameworks by attending to case studies from historical, current, and near-future engineering scenarios. Specific topics discussed include privacy and surveillance, bias and algorithmic systems, environmental sustainability and geoengineering, biological and genetic engineering, civil engineering and social justice, and universal design and accessibility.

Starting in academic year 2024–25, I will teach a second engineering ethics course each spring. The topic is to be determined.

Ethics Co-Piloting

Additionally, I work with the College of Engineering to develop ethics content across the curricula of the various majors in the college. This includes working one-on-one with engineering instructors to develop ethics material for inclusion in otherwise technical courses.

Before Cornell

Embedded EthiCS at Harvard

From 2021–23, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Embedded EthiCS at Harvard University. Embedded EthiCS is Harvard's computer ethics program, which distributes and embeds ethics lessons in existing computer science courses. These lessons are designed and taught by philosophy graduate students and postdocs, with support from faculty and postdocs in computer science, in an interdisciplinary teaching lab. I taught the following modules for the program:

Moral and Professional Responsibility in Computing, for CS 290A Seminar on Effective Research Practices and Academic Culture. Link to repository entry.
Value-Sensitive Design, for CS 290 PhD Grad Cohort Research Seminar. Link to repository entry.
Free Software: Freedoms and Responsibilities, for CS 153 Compilers. Link to repository entry.

I also taught a seminar and project-based course on the ethics of computing technologies for Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Students learned about a wide range of topics in computer ethics, and developed their own research or artistic projects, which were showcased at a mini-conference at the end of the semester. Download the syllabus here.

Athabasca University

In summer of 2021, I worked with Ethically Aligned AI, Inc., to design four self-paced online courses for their AI ethics micro-credential. The courses introduce lifelong learners to the basics of AI ethics, data ethics, some specific ethical issues related to machine learning, and roboethics. The learning environment features unique visual design and interactive activities, as well as feature interviews with academics, technologists, and activists, produced by Digital 55.

Visit the micro-credential website here.
Watch a video with me and the course co-designer, Katrina Ingram, here.
Read an article about the courses here.

Dalhousie University

From 2019–21, I was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at Dalhousie University. For two semesters, I taught Social, Ethical, and Professional Issues in Computer Science, which is a required course for all computer science majors, and an elective for philosophy majors and the law, justice, and society program. In Winter 2020, I taught the course face-to-face using Team-Based Learning, a pedagogical method that places students in permanent teams throughout the semester; teams worked together in-class to apply concepts from the lectures and readings to case studies. In Fall 2020, I redeveloped the course for online asynchronous instruction in response to ongoing pandemic lockdowns. Students still met virtually in groups to discuss and apply the readings.

Read a blog post about teaching this course here.
Read a blog post about how I taught using a clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation here.

University of Sheffield

I took my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. As a postgraduate research student, I taught tutorials and seminars for the following courses:

Knowledge, Justification, and Doubt
Matters of Life and Death
History of Philosophy
Key Arguments in the History of Philosophy
History of Ethics
Philosophical Projects: Epistemic Injustice

Trystan S. Goetze