ONLINE FIRST
published on September 27, 2025
Peter J. Katz

, William Davis
https://doi.org/10.5840/tej2025926171
The Practice of the Pause
Cultivating Reflection as an Intrinsic Good in STEM Ethics Pedagogy
Too often, in STEM education, ethical considerations are understood as instrumentally good, useful tools to justify predetermined values. To consider the intrinsic goodness of ethics education, we propose a new habit, for students and faculty both, that is unproductive and performative: a pause. Undergraduate STEM students learn from textbooks and tests to seek certainty, to remove the unnecessary, and drill into underlying causes. When they become STEM practitioners, however, simplified ethical rules and principles may not accurately guide them. If we teach students to practice a pause, to step back and reflect rather than rush to answer, we faculty must habituate ourselves to such introspection and deliberation in our research and teaching. With answers to any question seemingly a click away, we should develop the habit of deliberating, of holding our own ideas up for critical examination, of being skeptical of what we know.