This project is collaboration among California Polytechnic State University, Michigan Technological University, and Yale University. It is working to integrate sustainability into engineering education by creating effective learning materials and teaching strategies that enable engineering faculty to incorporate sustainability approaches into their courses. They are working to test the value of Fink's significant learning taxonomy and the accompanying assessment methodology as they develop their educational design and assessment tools. The key elements of this project include a textbook in environmental engineering, adaptable course modules on sustainability for science and engineering disciplines, engineering courses with team-based, open-ended, inter-university projects, faculty workshops to disseminate these innovative teaching and learning practices, and an assessment study including the development of new assessment tools to measure the effectiveness of these approaches. Although the curriculum is specifically targeted at the civil and environmental engineering community, it can be generalized to other engineering programs. They will be disseminating their material and results by publishing their textbook, by promoting their instructional modules, and by providing several faculty workshops on their material and instructional strategies. In evaluating their project, they are using an assortment of existing and new assessment tools to determine the effect of their new materials and strategies on student learning and retention. Broader impacts include the dissemination of the material, primarily through their textbook and workshops, and the increased awareness of engineering graduates to sustainability issues.
This project was explicitly focused on addressing some of the current barriers to integrating sustainability into engineering education – creating effective learning materials and proving the effectiveness of new teaching strategies that enable engineering faculty to more easily incorporate sustainability approaches into curricula. The products completed under this multi-institutional collaborative grant include an innovative college textbook for environmental engineers, comprehensive learning suites of classroom materials for general STEM audiences and 24 video tutorials organized around the following themes: systems thinking, sustainable development, energy, water, population and materials. Workshops included the participation and networking of seven STEM faculty members from underrepresented ethnic groups. Our research revealed that the theorized peer-to-peer networks were strongly influenced by the local institutional cultures. Furthermore, the nature of the local institutions predicted students' readiness to collaborate with those holding a different worldview; simply put, those attending more competitive institutions demonstrated a better understanding of the limits of their own understanding as well as a greater appreciation for different points of view. We also discovered that STEM faculty members identified themselves and their lack of preparation and understanding as the largest impediment to integrating sustainability principles into current curricula. The materials developed incorporate a "significant learning" teaching strategy. The video content is open access through the Open Education Resources Commmons (www.oer.org). Within three months of publishing the comprehensive open-source web materials, they have been downloaded by over 750 users.
