Associate Professor of Philosophy Jonathan Beever and Stephen M. Kuebler, from CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, have won the final COACHE Innovation Award for 2019-20. As part of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) survey, the COACHE award supports innovation, exploration and development by providing UCF faculty with time and funding to complete a project of their choosing.
Beever and Kuebler’s project for the COACHE award is “Cultivating an institutional culture of ethics and responsible conduct.” Through this project the pair hopes to create workshops for new faculty, post docs and graduate students. Further, these workshops will allow participants to understand ethical conduct through the lens of their professional work, and to support participants to becoming ERC advocates in their home disciplines. This approach, Beever and Kuebler note, will be beneficial to graduate students’ transitions into professional careers, faculty members’ professional development and mentoring capacities, and strengthening of an institutional culture of ethics.
In conjunction with this initiative, Beever and Kuebler have written articles for the UCF Forum highlighting several topics relating to ethics and current trends. Their article about self-driving cars was picked up by Brigham-Young University (BYU) Radio where they discussed some of their ideas further. Listen to it here (begins at 49:03).
The award is a progressive award, in which given over the course of three years. In the initial year, seven projects were awarded funds, including three that involved CAH faculty (Blake Scott and Laurie Pinkert from the Department of Writing and Rhetoric, and Beever.) Faculty who receive awards in 2017-18 were provided the opportunity to apply for additional funding in 2018-19 to scale up or improve the project. Of the three awards granted in 2018-19, two were given to projects involving CAH faculty members (Beever and Pinkert). Beever’s project was selected for the third and final round of funding.