Abstract
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.
Introduction
The need to transition human civilization toward sustainability has been the subject of many publications over the past several years, such as assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2024) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services [Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2023]. Engineers are among those best positioned to understand how technology can assist the necessary changes, and in fact many environmental engineers are focusing on this issue with respect to environmental sustainability. As a result, environmental engineering curricula around the world have been changing to include more sustainability issues in both undergraduate and graduate environmental engineering programs (Glavic, 2006; Murphy et al, 2009; Anderson and Cooper, 2024).
In recent years, the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) has hosted several 3-h workshops on updating environmental engineering courses with sustainability lectures, problems, projects, and other activities, with parts of the content based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, 2024). These workshops have been built on earlier lectures and workshops, some held at AEESP and some held elsewhere, as part of the Center for Sustainable Engineering (CSE). The CSE was funded by NSF from 2005 to 2012 and continues today. The goal of these workshops has been to enable participants to develop new courses or revise existing courses to include sustainability content related to the course technical material. Such courses will help students appreciate the role of engineers in transitioning society to preserve the life-sustaining capacity of the planet.
The workshops at the AEESP meetings in 2022 (Washington University, St. Louis) and 2023 (Northeastern University, Boston), as well as several previous workshops, have followed a similar format. In the first hour, attendees meet in a plenary session. Workshop instructors describe educational innovations they have developed to introduce students to sustainability concepts and problem-solving with active and place-based pedagogical approaches. In the second hour, the group divides into breakouts by topic, with both inexperienced and highly experienced participants for peer-to-peer facilitated sharing of approaches and ideas. This leads to a completed action plan for each participant as a workshop takeaway. For the last hour, participants meet again in a plenary session, and each group presents the ideas described in their breakout. Finally, the instructors summarize the workshop and distribute a survey.
In this article, we report on the 2022 and 2023 workshops. First, we describe the demographics of the workshop participants and their prior experiences in teaching. Then, we comment on subjects taught by the participants and at what educational levels. Finally, we discuss examples of teaching topics reported by workshop participants and briefly discuss a few of the challenges in teaching sustainability to environmental engineering students.
Demographics of Workshop Participants
In 2022, there were 36 participants from 28 schools (28 completed surveys were received); in 2023, there were 33 participants from 21 schools (25 completed surveys). The participants were all from the U.S. and included a range of experiences from graduate students to full professors (Table 1). No participants attended both workshops. Both workshops show a mix of inexperienced and experienced attendees, although the 2023 workshop shows fewer graduate students and more faculty with extensive teaching records compared with 2022. A total of 44 different schools were represented at the two workshops. These numbers exclude the workshop instructors.
Number of Participants in Each Category Attending the Workshops in 2022 and 2023
The values for 2022 are underestimates, as the rank of only 25 participants could be identified from the workshop sign-ins out of the 36 who attended.
Workshop instructors are not included in these numbers. The values for 2023 are more accurate, as the rank of 32 participants could be identified out of 33 who attended. The category “Instructors, Admin.” includes professors of practice, teaching professors, administrators, and other nontenure track personnel.
Participants in both years were asked how many total undergraduate and graduate courses they have taught with greater than 4 h of sustainability content each (this was explained as “more than 4 h of classroom time with activities directly related to sustainability”). The results are shown in Figure 1. Half of the 2022 workshop attendees (14/28) had never taught such a course. At the other end of the scale, five attendees at the 2022 workshop had taught such a course more than four times. In contrast to 2022, the 2023 workshop data in Figure 1 show that only seven attendees had never taught such a course, while 11 attendees had taught courses with this level of sustainability content more than four times. This suggests that the 2023 workshop attracted somewhat more experienced teachers in sustainability, which is consistent with Table 1.
Distribution of experience teaching courses (either one quarter or one semester in length) with sustainability content among the workshop participants in 2022 and 2023.
Topics Taught by Workshop Participants
A 2014 national survey of sustainability in engineering courses taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels investigated 21 topics within the broad area of sustainability (Davidson et al., 2016). For consistency, the surveys in the 2022 and 2023 workshops included these same topics (Table 2). Participants were asked to select those topics where they had spent at least 4 h of class time on sustainability and to identify the education level(s) of the course, from freshman to graduate level. Topics identified by the greatest number of participants in both workshops, starting with the most frequent topic, were (1) water, (2) life cycle assessment (LCA), (3 and 4 tie score) climate change and energy/power generation, (5) design, and (6) pollution prevention. Many of these topics overlap with those most frequently selected by the 2014 survey respondents.
List of Topics and Top Ranked Items Included on the Survey Given to Workshop Participants
2014 data from Davidson et al. (2016).
The 2014 survey respondents generally taught more advanced (i.e., upper division) students: only 8% taught freshmen and sophomores, while 27% taught juniors and/or seniors, with many respondents not specifying the level. The 2022 workshop respondents also taught very few freshmen and sophomores, with a much larger number of juniors, seniors, and graduate students. Interestingly, the 2023 respondents had less of a difference in the number of courses for lower and upper division students, although courses for juniors and seniors still outweighed those for freshmen and sophomores.
Research Topics and Global Challenges Integrated into Teaching
The theme of the 2022 AEESP Conference was integrating research into teaching. During the breakout sessions, many of the workshop participants reported topics of their research that they bring into their courses, for example:
Use of biochar from pyrolysis of solid waste for land application, leachate sorbent or landfill cover Sustainable technologies for hydrogen production Selection of solvents for bioseparations Onsite wastewater treatment for small communities, especially in remote locations Use of microbial self-healing cement
The theme of the 2023 AEESP Conference was responding to global challenges. Once again, many participants indicated how their courses considered specific engineering problems, including those occurring on a global scale, for example:
Links between course topics and the UN Sustainable Development Goals Energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from engineered infrastructure Use of renewable energy and energy recovery in wastewater treatment Hands-on exercises to explore characteristics of materials, such as the strength of plastics Stakeholder engagement and environmental justice
It is of interest that the 2022 conference provided a source of data for environmental impacts of the conference itself. Aronson et al. (2024) report on a LCA of the conference-related activities of the 783 attendees. The data in this article could be used in class to enable students to think about the impacts of the environmental community on the environment.
Challenges in Teaching Sustainability
AEESP members attending these two workshops were enthusiastic about bringing sustainability into their courses. However, discussions in the breakout groups pointed out some of the challenges in doing so.
Sustainability begins with the principle that any decision is going to have consequences that may be felt far into the future and at wide-ranging locations. Students may not have the experience to enable them to understand these links. Even highly experienced engineers may be surprised to hear about negative impacts of some engineered products—inventions such as tetraethyl lead (1920s) and CFCs (1930s) both had global unintended consequences.
LCA has become a popular way of quantifying impacts throughout the manufacture, use, and disposal stages of a product. Obtaining data to conduct the assessment can be a major effort, and deciding where to draw boundaries around the assessment may be difficult. There were many examples of integrating life cycle thinking into courses. This more qualitative approach helps students learn to use a systems perspective to identify potential environmental impacts along the materials and energy supply chain for any process or product.
Another challenge brought up at the workshops is that decisions on whether to construct centralized or distributed systems may be important to enabling sustainable communities, but reaching the best decision requires defining criteria for success as well as consideration of social, environmental, and economic sustainability. Students in environmental engineering may not have much experience in social and economic sustainability, which points to the need for some sustainability-related general education course offerings to complement their technical education.
In many cases, sustainability in engineering education is not just related to the course content but also to the pedagogical practices and ways that we frame what an engineer does. Our students must learn to think critically and systemically while developing the ability to anticipate future societal trends and needs. They also need the communication and other interpersonal skills to work on transdisciplinary teams. These ways of thinking and doing are captured in the growing body of literature that describes sustainability competencies (e.g., UNESCO, 2017; Redman and Wiek, 2021; Lemelson Foundation, 2022). Students need to acquire these competencies to solve societal problems in a sustainable way. Most engineering curricula do not provide students the opportunities to acquire all these competencies, and many faculty members are not well-prepared to teach them.
Conclusions
The need for courses incorporating sustainability concepts will only grow as the world demands more and more of engineers. Workshops such as these thus serve an important role in AEESP. Based on our experiences and a growing understanding of sustainability in engineering education, we believe these types of workshops are greatly needed and should be ongoing. The mix of expert presentations and peer-to-peer discussions and learning provides avenues for more faculty to have the capacity to integrate sustainability topics into their courses. The faculty need to consider not just sustainability topics, but also the active and place-based pedagogical approaches that help students transform knowledge into ways of thinking and making decisions that are essential for a sustainable future.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the AEESP conference organizers at Washington University and Northeastern University for hosting these workshops, and wish to thank the participants of the workshops for sharing their ideas and experiences for the benefit of the group. Special thanks to Ed Waisanen for his assistance with the Washington University workshop.
Authors’ Contributions
C.I.D.: Conceptualization (equal), data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology (equal), project administration, resources, software, supervision, validation, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing (equal). R.D.H.: Conceptualization (equal), methodology (equal), writing—review and editing (equal). S.E.P.: Conceptualization (equal), methodology (equal), writing—review and editing (equal). Q.Z.: Conceptualization (equal), methodology (equal), writing—review and editing (equal). J.Z.: Conceptualization (equal), methodology (equal), writing—review and editing (equal).
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.
Funding Information
No funding was received for this article.