Integrating sustainability principles in undergraduate engineering curriculum a home for environmentally responsible engineering

Abstract

The first two years of many engineering curricula are saturated with foundational mathematics and science, design skills, engineering fundamentals, and professional practices. The complexity of sustainability principles often forces its relocation later in the educational process, leading to a treatment which is too marginal to be meaningful. The Home for Environmentally Responsible Engineering (HERE) at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT) is an effort to incorporate sustainability principles early in the curriculum. The HERE program integrates sustainability throughout the freshman-year curriculum for a cohort of interested students across disciplines. The HERE students reside together in a living-learning community during their freshman year and take four courses as a group, including sustainability-themed sections of courses in college and life skills and rhetoric and composition, as well as a humanities elective course on sustainability in a global context. The fourth common course is the introduction to design course, where the HERE cohort will be able to implement a real sustainable engineering project on the RHIT campus, courtesy of a grant from Procter & Gamble. The goal of the common first-year classes and the shared residence hall is to provide the students a model for making sustainability a foundational part of their engineering education and practice. By assessing student knowledge of sustainability principles at the beginning and end of the freshman year, the effectiveness of the program is evaluated to show that the HERE program helps students learn to view sustainable design methodologies and awareness of the triple bottom line as integral to their understanding of the profession of engineering. Future plans are being developed to continue the program past the freshman year. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.