Roundtable Held Aiming to Reshape First-year APSC Sustainability Experience

APSC Sustainability Roundtable was hosted on Nov 12 to engage stakeholders in the Faculty to solicit directions on how to design the first year APSC experience related to sustainability.  About 15 faculty member and students gathered to discuss the following prompts.

–Activity #1: When thinking about student attributes around sustainability, what do we need to see from our students to know that they have achieved these?

–Activity #2: What does, could, or should sustainability education look like in first year engineering?

–Activity #3: What does, could, or should sustainability education look like in the final year?

Key themes resulting from the session are listed below,

Prepare Students for Complexity

 Highlight the difference between precise technical problems (black and white) and complex, fuzzy, uncertain, and messy “real world” problems

 Prepare and support students to be able to deal with these latter problems

 Connect technical problems to real‐world problems

 

Possible Learning Outcomes for First Year

 Demonstrate an awareness of issues related to sustainability when considering real‐world engineering problems

 Articulate the context of an engineering problem in terms of sustainability and identify areas of impact (including identifying all stakeholders)

 Describe the foundational concepts in sustainability (e.g. systems thinking) and demonstrate a working understanding of a sustainability lexicon

 Think critically to apply concepts from sustainability to real world problems; ask the right questions

 

Suggestions for First Year

 Integrate (infuse) sustainability throughout the curriculum

 Use case studies, possibly involving engineering failures, possibly involving a large number (~50) vignettes spread through in‐class and out‐of‐class examples

 Focus on raising student awareness

 Will need to consider how are we going to educate instructors about sustainability

 High school students are already exposed to sustainability – before redesigning curriculum need to find out what our students already have

 [Note: consider highlighting novice to expert development and approach to dealing with complex, fuzzy problems]

 

Suggestions for Final Year

 Have rich learning experience (large project, grand challenge, multi‐disciplinary cross‐university experiences,…)

 Be able to quantify engineering outputs