Enhancing the Sustainability Content of Courses in Environmental Engineering: Reports of Workshops at the 2022 St. Louis and the 2023 Boston AEESP Conferences

The AEESP Research and Education Conference series has for many years included workshops to improve teaching and learning in environmental engineering but has only recently focused on incorporating sustainability into environmental engineering programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Here, we summarize two recent workshops with a total of 69 participants from 44 colleges and universities, which were built on two previous pilot workshops and could be a foundation for future sustainability efforts. Approximately 44% of the participants were graduate students and postdocs with limited or no teaching experience, while the remainder were either nontenure-track or tenure-track instructors. Sixteen of the participants, along with the workshop organizers, had taught sustainability in at least five courses, and this experience enabled them to contribute valuable ideas throughout the workshops. Although all areas of engineering can incorporate sustainability concepts and principles, some topics within environmental engineering seem most popular for teaching sustainability to our students. When asked to indicate topics they have used for teaching sustainability from a list of 21 topic areas, the one identified by the most participants was water, with life cycle assessment in second place and with climate change and energy/power generation tied for third place. For the six topics identified by the greatest number of participants in each workshop, only the first three of these topics were included in the top six in both workshops. An identical list of 21 topics given in an online U.S. survey in 2014 with 140 respondents showed that the six most frequently chosen topics included all four of these. The workshops described here are part of an international effort to enhance the teaching of sustainability to engineering students on a global scale.