Learning sustainability through the design process

Abstract

First-year engineering students across disciplines who have joined the HERE: Living and Learning Today for Tomorrow program (formerly the Home for Environmentally Responsible Engineering) participate in a three-course sequence: Introduction to Sustainability, Rhetoric and Composition, and Introduction to Design. The program is a living-learning community where students live together on two floors in the same residence hall, participate in co-curricular professional development activities, and work on co-curricular team projects. For its fifth iteration of freshman students in the program, we introduced a new approach of presenting content through implementation of a basic design process in all courses. By working through the design process in each course, students in the HERE program made connections among various sustainability issues, created value by formulating solutions to global, regional, and campus-based problems, and fostered curiosity through co-curricular professional development opportunities and project work. We have integrated the design process into the curriculum for each separate course, with specific focus on certain stages of the design process in each course. Sustainability content in each course focused on energy, water, carbon, biodiversity, and food production in the context of global, regional, or local case studies. Design-based content includes project definition, exploration of solutions, proposal development, design validation, and reporting through oral and written communication. To assess the first year of this new approach, we conducted pre- and post-surveys for all students in the cohort. The surveys include content-based material to measure knowledge attained, as well as perspectives on sustainability in engineering to observe any changes from the start to the end of their participation in the program. Students also performed routine self-assessments and reflections, based on a developed set of program learning outcome, at the beginning, middle, and end of each quarter. In their reflections, students noted where they have achieved this level of learning (i.e. course content or specific co-curricular activities). Through implementation of the design process in the courses of the HERE program, we anticipated that students would reach higher levels of learning in sustainable design.