About

Bryn Elizabeth Seabrook is an Assistant Professor in Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Humanities, Science and Environment with a minor in Vocal Performance in 2012, her Master of Science in Science and Technology Studies in 2014, and her Doctor of Philosophy in Science and Technology Studies in 2016, all from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her research interests include bioethics, public participation in environmental policymaking, energy efficiency, climate change, negotiating the environmental - consumer nexus, and analyzing American consumer culture. Seabrook challenges her students to address difficult ethical scenarios in the professional world of engineering, emphasizing the development of valuable skills for their future careers. She teaches courses related to science, technology, and society, including topics on engineering practice, ethics, and the environment, contributing to the integration of societal considerations into engineering education.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Engineering management
• Engineering
• Engineering ethics
• Knowledge management
• Pedagogy

Selected publications

• Empowering Engineers: Teaching Feedback Dynamics Through Generative AI

  2026-03-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The recent Cengage Group 2025 Graduate Employability Report shares data that indicates institutions of higher education are not preparing recent graduates with sufficient AI skills.The report estimates that 78 million jobs will be created globally because of AI by 2030, but only 51% of graduates felt their education prepared them with sufficient AI skills when applying for jobs [1].However, the 2025 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report describes the top 5 core skills for the workforce as analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and motivation and self-awareness [2].Institutions of higher education need to evaluate not only how to teach the technical skills of AI, but also how to align these technical skills with professional skills that strengthen character and virtue.The purpose of this project is to explore the integration of generative AI as a pedagogical tool to enhance undergraduate engineering students' abilities to both give and receive feedback throughout the writing process.By leveraging AI-driven platforms, students engage in iterative writing exercises where they receive personalized, constructive feedback on their research projects.This approach not only fosters critical thinking and self-reflection but also encourages collaborative learning among peers.The project employs a mixed-methods research design, combining qualitative and quantitative assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of AI in improving writing proficiency and feedback dynamics.Preliminary findings suggest that students who interacted with generative AI demonstrated increased confidence in their writing abilities and a greater understanding of constructive criticism.This innovative educational strategy aims to prepare future engineers not only to excel in technical writing but also to engage in meaningful dialogue about their work, thus enhancing their professional competencies in a collaborative environment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• AI Unleashed: Navigating Ethical Integration of Generative Tools in an Undergraduate Classroom

  2025-04-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As generative AI tools increasingly permeate educational settings, the need for a critical examination of their integration in undergraduate classrooms becomes paramount.This paper invites the reader into a general discussion about the ethical implications of using AI technologies within the context of an undergraduate engineering classroom.While AI presents transformative opportunities for enhancing learning, it also raises significant ethical dilemmas regarding equity, privacy, and academic integrity.Engineering educators share the responsibility to teach students about how innovations, including AI, should reduce the risk of bias.At the same time, faculty often lack institutional resources to develop pertinent pedagogical skills for discussing AI ethics with students, colleagues, and other communities.There is no nationwide consensus on how these tools should be used in higher education.Scholars like Ethan Mollick, Jos Antonio Bowen, and C. Edward Watson have published extensively on establishing a general understanding of AI tools, including preliminary guides for exercises that can be translated into classroom practices.While these works are informative and timely, they also rely on the assumption that AI adoption is inevitable, meaning that faculty do not have a role in shaping how students use these technologies.This paper aims to create a new narrative about inevitability to empower faculty to become informed advocates for ethical AI practices, ultimately co-creating a classroom environment that balances innovation with integrity.By rethinking the role of AI in higher education, faculty and students alike can practice a reflective and responsible approach to technology use, ensuring that the benefits of AI are harnessed without compromising core educational values.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Incorporating Giving Voice to Values (GVV) into an Engineering Ethics Course

  2024-02-07 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The Department of Engineering and Society instructors at the University of Virginia recently developed a new course on Engineering Ethics aimed at second- and third-year students. Unlike previous courses in the department, the mid-level course emphasizes micro-ethics and employs the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) framework. The emphasis on micro-ethics is timely and appropriate given the polarization and plurality of views and beliefs in our nation and world and the increasingly higher stakes of engineering practice. To help students understand how they can act on their personal ethics, the course also incorporates the GVV material, originally developed for application in business settings. The GVV modules in this course were adapted specifically for use in engineering education, in collaboration with the GVV founder and the Online Ethics Center (OEC) director and are now available through the OEC for anyone to use. This paper provides an overview of the GVV portion of the new course design and discusses initial impressions from piloting the course over three semesters.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Generative AI as an Active Learning Tool to Refine Professional Engineering Skills

  2024-04-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Nontechnical engineering skills are integral to the successful practice of the engineering profession.However, the dominant image of engineering rarely evokes ideas of typing pages of prose.A field that has been adopted into the engineering curriculum to help engage engineering students in higher education is Science, Technology, and Society (STS).As an interdisciplinary field, STS offers an active-learning environment to refine nontechnical engineering skills like problem-solving and communication.One recent question amongst STS scholars for engineers is: what role will generative AI play in the learning process for written communication?Perhaps one question that has not received as much attention is how this kind of AI could be beneficial in university-level nontechnical engineering classrooms.The purpose of this study is to underscore the importance of nontechnical engineering skills that are learned through the lens of Science, Technology, and Society (STS).The author builds on previous scholarship to demonstrate how discussion-based courses challenge undergraduate engineering students to think more critically about the integration of the social dimensions of engineering problems into the engineering design process.Active learning modules like "Tinkering with ChatGPT" demonstrate the implications and applications of AI inside and outside the classroom.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Foundations of Education as a Model for Social Foundations of Engineering: Possibilities for Engaging the Philosophy of Engineering

  2024-08-04

  articleOpen access

  The field of social foundations of education emerged in the early 1930s with the aim of developing a comprehensive understanding of "the cultural phenomena-institutions, processes, practices, beliefs, values, and ways of knowing-that underlie any society's educational ideas and practices" [1].By extension, social foundations of engineering-a field that does not yet exist, but should-would seek to understand the institutions, processes, practices, beliefs, values, and ways of knowing that underlie engineering education and practice.The fundamentals of these foundations have emerged in critiques of engineering grounded in several different perspectives including science, technology, and society (STS), engineering ethics, and engineering and social justice.Thus far, however, these perspectives have not coalesced into a coherent intellectual framework.In this paper, we draw parallels between engineering and social foundations of education as the field has evolved over time and argue that social foundations of education provides a promising model for social foundations of engineering.We draw on the literature in philosophy of engineering, STS, and engineering and social justice to identify intellectual traditions and frameworks that can be used to flesh out the conception of social foundations of engineering.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “How Engineering Impacts Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”: A Case Study in Graduate Course Design and Assessment

  2024-02-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Racist soap dispensers, algorithmic bias, and the confrontation of historical inequities exemplify incomplete engineering. What these case studies neglect to account for is diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). How does the engineer of the twenty-first century understand the impact of their research in the context of DEI? Non-technical engineering courses provide important tools to better understand the sociotechnical systems of the profession. This study evaluates a new graduate level course titled "How Engineering Impacts Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" that emphasizes the importance of non-technical engineering skills, with a focus on DEI. This course considers writings from a variety of authors, representing distinctive perspectives on matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through active engagement with this material, this course confronts history to identify and understand instances of racism, sexism, discrimination, and bias, specifically in science and engineering. This study builds on previous scholarship presented to ASEE along with other related fields to demonstrate how discussion-based courses challenge graduate students to think more critically about the engineering design process and the active integration of the social dimensions of engineering problems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Choreographing Virtue: The Role of Situatedness and Layering in Building Moral Muscle Memory in Engineering Ethics Education

  2024-08-04

  articleSenior author

  Abstract This paper explores the contribution that a situated and competency-layering pedagogy can offer to enhance the effectiveness of Giving Voice to Values (GVV), a growing model for teaching ethical leadership in engineering, business, law, and other professional fields. The uptake of GVV as a framework for ethical leadership practice and education has had a growing influence in business school curricula, and more recently, in engineering ethics education. GVV is an innovative model that bridges ethical decision-making and ethical action by preparing learners to develop scripts and action plans for acting consistently with their values in ethically challenging scenarios. The approach moves away from discussing what the right action would be according to different ethical normative frameworks, and instead starts from the premise that most people are able to recognize the right course of action that is consistent with their values, and want to pursue it; however, they have difficulties acting accordingly. Central to this learning model is the application of a thought experiment framed as: "Assuming I know what I want to do to act on my values, how can I get it done?" The capacity to bridge the space between decision and action is strengthened by reflection about past experiences and each person's specific style and personality. [Department Name] at [University Name] is currently applying the GVV model in its undergraduate engineering ethics courses. The developer of the GVV framework has stated that the model's use of the notion of "moral muscle memory" draws in part from the pedagogical approach to layering the physical, emotional, and cognitive abilities to respond to situations of violence that were developed within the Impact or Empowered Self Defense method of gender violence prevention. The authors, faculty members of [Department Name] at [University Name] are proposing a Situated Ethical Action Framework (SEAF) described in this paper to enhance the development of engineering students' competencies for responding to ethical predicaments. SEAF draws on both conflict resolution process design methods and on elements of layering derived from the Empowered Self Defense pedagogy. It introduces additional scenario-building and response-planning strategies that can enhance the stepwise rehearsal experience of the learner, and therefore their sense of self-efficacy in applying the GVV framework. The proposed innovation incorporates two additional elements: concentric circles of engagement and stepwise rehearsal of interactions. Concentric circles of engagement involve different centers of focus and degrees of involvement of others in the learner's process of ethical decision-making and action, which expand from an internal cognitive space where the dilemma is acknowledged and analyzed, to preliminary interactions with trusted others to better understand the issue, to assessing organizational cultures and stakes, to ultimately engaging with others to raise concerns and seek alternatives. Stepwise rehearsal of interactions includes a breakdown of the steps necessary to engage with others at each of these circles, from preparing to frame concerns to scripting difficult conversations. This paper presents the pedagogical foundations for this revised approach and preliminary insights from its early application in an undergraduate course.

  PublisherDOI

• Applying STS to Engineering Education: A Comparative Study of STS Minors

  2024

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering

  Their work examines the intersection of law, technology, and culture, with particular interests in materiality, sustainability, and practices of resistance and change

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• In Search of Integration: Mapping Conceptual Efforts to Apply STS to Engineering Education

  2020 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science

  Abstract As David Edge points out in his introduction to the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Sage, 1995), the field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) is a diverse enterprise that developed in response to a heterogeneous set of desires ranging from a more rational basis for science policy to the democratization of science and the reform of engineering and science education. In this paper, we focus on STS as it can be applied in the practice of engineering to foster both socially responsible and commercially successful innovation. In an academic context, applying STS to engineering practice frequently takes the form of integrating a sociotechnical systems perspective into educational enterprises such as the major design experience mandated by ABET. Leaving aside the practical challenges of such integration, we focus here on what we learn about STS when we teach it to upper-level engineering students and expect them to use STS frameworks and approaches to inform the design and research that they undertake as part of their engineering education. We draw on two sources of evidence from which such lessons can be extrapolated: (1) the discourse of ASEE as captured in the PEER document repository and (2) our experience in mentoring hundreds of students in all engineering disciplines through the process of using STS perspectives and research to inform their major design experience. Quantitative analysis of papers suggests that STS entered the discourse of ASEE in the period from 2004-2007, with another burst of activity in 2010-2011 (2011 being the year that “Engineering and Society” was added to “Liberal Education” to create LEES) and culminating in the highest level of discussion in 2017 and 2018. Our experience of guiding engineering students in the application of STS to their major design experience leads us to conclude that the ethical practice of engineering requires an understanding of the contingent and usually convoluted sequence of events through which technological innovations translate (or not) into both desired outcomes and unintended negative consequences. In other words, STS perspectives and analytical frameworks are essential for connecting the dots from intent to innovation to impacts.

  PublisherDOI

• Teaching STS to Engineers: A Comparative Study of Embedded STS Programs

  2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access Proceedings · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Engineering ethics

  The field of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) draws from a full range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to examine how science and technology simultaneously shape and are shaped by society, including politics and culture. Although engineering educators and employers have recognized the importance of professional (nontechnical) skills for over 100 years, the instructional strategies and institutional arrangements necessary to help students develop these skills have not yet settled into a widely adopted standard. Many engineering programs have turned to STS to provide students with conceptual tool kits to think about engineering problems and solutions in more sophisticated ways. Some programs feature standalone courses on the sociocultural aspects of technology and engineering, often taught by faculty from outside the engineering school. Others incorporate STS material into traditional engineering courses, e.g., by making ethical or societal impact assessments part of capstone projects. This work in progress paper draws on the research team's personal experience to examine the character of an atypical, but potentially very powerful, model: STS programs embedded in engineering schools in the United States and Canada. The authors expand on previous scholarship by Kathryn Neeley, Caitlin Wylie, and Bryn Seabrook in "In Search of Integration: Mapping Conceptual Efforts to Apply STS to Engineering Education," as presented at the 2019 ASEE annual conference, to examine how STS is incorporated in engineering education. While Neeley, Wylie, and Seabrook focused on broad trends within a single, large professional society (ASEE), this study focuses on two particular embedded STS programs, with an emphasis on how the research team describes STS for engineers and encourages meaningful integration. What does the field of STS offer engineering students? What core STS concepts and approaches do we teach to engineering students? The authors explore these and other related questions by analyzing how a small sample of programs became embedded within engineering schools, how each program attends to accreditation outcomes, and how they approach teaching STS to engineers. In future work, the research team hopes to create a preliminary typology of embedded STS programs, explore the term "embedded," and find commonalities in the courses offered in embedded programs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kathryn Neeley

  American Society For Engineering Education

  21 shared

• Brandiff Caron

  Concordia University

  16 shared

• Kari Zacharias

  Virginia Tech

  16 shared

• William J. Davis

  Citadel

  5 shared

• Sergio Guillen Grillo

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Joshua Earle

  University of Virginia

  4 shared

• Kent Wayland

  University of Virginia

  2 shared

• MC Forelle

  University of Virginia

  1 shared