Summit on Global Sustainability in Engineering: Rationale and Planning Phase

Published in: Engineering Innovations for Global Sustainability: Proceedings of the 14th Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology
Date of Conference: July 20-22, 2016
Location of Conference: San Jose, Costa Rica
Authors: Robert Nagel
Jacquelyn Nagel
Iván Esparragoza
Linda Schmidt
Jorge Rodríguez
Refereed Paper: #200

Abstract:

The growing global awareness on developing products, structures, and processes in a sustainable fashion is demanding the incorporation of sustainability-related topics in engineering curricula. One of the biggest challenges, however, is teaching students to appreciate and understand the complex and global nature of sustainability challenges. Although some efforts have been made in academia to incorporate sustainability, work remains to identify the most effective techniques to teach our students—especially in less quantifiable contexts (e.g., global and cultural). Toward meeting this challenge, the authors are preparing a Summit to bring together scholars from across the Americas with expertise in teaching and learning techniques for sustainability. The main goal of the Summit is to bring together a small group of researchers to explore pedagogical models to introduce global sustainability awareness in engineering education, and for the group of researchers to formulate action plans for developing and deploying learning modules that introduce global sustainability awareness to students at their home institutions. This paper reports on the preliminary work performed in preparation for the Summit. It introduces the “Engaged Learning” approach developed as a part of this project to guide Summit participants in developing and deploying learning activities, and it provides planned assessment activities.