This TUES Type 1 project is creating a sustainability toolbox and evaluating a combination of traditional and non-traditional teaching pedagogy applied toward training engineers to be change agents capable of ethically and competently converting care into action for a sustainable world. This project evaluates six teaching strategies (interventions) within an ethics of care approach, four at the sophomore level and two at the senior design level. Key components of increasingly non-traditional approaches to teaching sustainability are: (a) the use of dramatized video to emotionally engage and motivate students in problems of sustainability and (b) the use of online skill building tutorials that explicitly prepare the student to solve "wicked" problems that require higher order cognitive skills to formulate and address. The PACT (Promoting, Accounting, Compensating, and Targeting) approach to designing for sustainability is incorporated, so that students can transform their awareness of and responsibility for sustainability into meaningful action, regardless of the type and purpose of design.
The strategies are oriented around consumer electronics, whose life cycle remains an unsustainable, widely proliferating beast of consumption that shows little sign of slowing in the modern world. Unlike many other facets of the engineering curriculum, evaluating critical thinking or problem solving in the area of sustainability is not enough to assess whether a student is trained well. Instead, the student must use these high-level thinking skills in often unstructured series of complex, interwoven problems that are situated in an effective transformation of care into action. Through a carefully designed series of interventions and assessments oriented around teaching sustainability, this project offers insight into what teaching approaches work best for improving student learning about the "wicked" problems typically found at the intersection of technology and sustainability.
The importance of training engineers not simply to be aware but also to be appropriately responsible and sufficiently competent in caring about (and acting on) sustainability issues has broad societal impacts. The developed interventions and strategies have the potential to be adopted/adapted by other engineering fields. By addressing an important social issue such as sustainability and showing the important role of engineers in solving this problem, some students might be more attracted to engineering as a career and be more likely to remain in the field. In addition, interventions that connect sustainability to technology can be used to enhance the image of engineering as a career that directly benefits society, thereby enabling engineering to appeal more broadly to students at all stages in K-16 pathways.
