WIP: Towards a Sustainability Practice and Ethos in a First-Year, Engineering Design Experience

This Work-in-Progress Innovative Practice paper describes a five-year sustainability intervention in an introductory engineering design course. With the aim of preparing future engineers, undergraduate engineering education is shifting environmental sustainability from the outskirts of the student experience to the center of curricular structures. For example, student engagements with environmental sustainability, referred to as “sustainability” in this paper, are moving from co-curricular experiences (e.g., Grand Challenges Scholars Program) to required coursework. Efforts to identify and inculcate sustainability-related knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as behaviors, beliefs, and mindsets needed by engineering graduates are advancing. This transformation, while critical, can be challenging for institutions, instructors, and students alike, and results from early implementers of sustainability-related curricular experiences can inform these efforts. We present an intervention integrating ecological system design practices. Our innovative practice lies in pursuing holistic treatment of environmental sustainability in a core required introductory course enlivening disciplinary practices with student-centered pedagogy. For the purposes of preliminary assessment of this intervention, we reviewed students' engagement with sustainability during the course, their post-experience sustainability beliefs and attitudes, and the course assistants' narratives about their engagement with the students focused on sustainability. Preliminary results indicate a limited affinity for autonomous engagement with sustainability practices. Potential emerging explanations include differing perspectives between students and instructors on what constitutes impactful sustainability practice, a lack of a supporting context for establishing personal beliefs, and a lack of support for developing course-related ideas of the self and sustainability. Our experience has implications for early STEM curricula involving environmental sustainability. Requiring sustainability knowledge, skills, and abilities development ensures all students experience certain practices, but does not ensure their adoption into professional identities. We propose highlighting the course's hidden curriculum and focusing on the social architecture, establishing a more explicit community-of-practice container to enable more authentic sustainability participation.