The Call of Stories: reading and writing in the humanities with engineering and science faculty

Ethics is, of course, one of the areas highlighted in the new ABET Criteria 2000, and currently many engineering educators are struggling with how to incorporate ethics into their courses without having to become "ethics teachers." We describe here one approach that may work for them. In a National Endowment for the Humanities project at the Colorado School of Mines, we have adapted Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles' model to use stories from literature and from participants' experiences to help faculty educate engineering students who are ethical or, as Coles says, "trying to find a good way to live this life". In this paper we introduce the "Call of Stories" project, describe the seminar approach we used in the project, and discuss the outcomes of our year-long experience in reading and writing with engineering science, and humanities faculty.