Improving Climate Change Educational Outcomes for First-year Students Through Multidisciplinary Instruction

Abstract

Students enrolling in undergraduate academic programs today are facing a world in which climate change impacts are increasingly visible and severe. As future leaders charged with developing and implementing solutions, it is critical that they be prepared to understand the complexity of the problem. Our Grand Challenges Freshman Seminar course uses a multidisciplinary approach to engage first-year engineering and humanities students in multidimensional critical thinking about climate change. Our teaching team consists of faculty members with expertise in environmental engineering, rhetoric, and policy. Our classes begin with student-led discussions of course readings and culminate in lectures with active-learning exercises. Our assignments are designed to encourage students to reflect on their individual impact on the environment, develop their capacity to read scientific papers, and understand the complexity and challenges of international climate negotiations. We believed these strategies would help students master technical content, see connections among the multiple disciplines related to climate change, and develop critical thinking, argumentation, and communication skills. To assess the efficacy of our strategies, we surveyed students at the end of the course using both quantitative and qualitative instruments. In these surveys students reported a statistically significant increase in their understanding of the interdisciplinary character of climate change. Further, the course received high satisfaction ratings and many students noted their intention to major in climate-relevant disciplines (e.g., environmental engineering, economics).. By sharing our pedagogical strategies and results in this paper, we hope to encourage colleagues to consider adopting this instructional framework as a strategy for inspiring students to become well-informed future leaders on this most pressing issue.