A Toolkit for Expanding Sustainability Engineering Utilizing Foundations of the Engineering for One Planet Initiative

2023

Conference Paper

hi

Recently, there has been a significant push to prepare all engineers with skills in sustainability, motivated by industry needs, accreditation requirements, and international efforts such as the National Science Foundation’s 10 Big Ideas and Grand Challenges and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper discusses a new toolkit to enable broad dissemination of vetted tools to help engineering faculty members teach sustainability using resources from the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) initiative. This toolkit is to be used as a mechanism to engage a diversity of stakeholders to use their voices, experiences, and connections to share the need for national curricular change in engineering education widely. This toolkit can foster the integration of sustainability-focused learning outcomes into engineering courses and programs. This is particularly important for graduating engineers at this crucial time when we collectively face a convergence of national- and global-scale planetary crises that professional engineers will directly and indirectly impact. Catalyzed by The Lemelson Foundation and VentureWell, the EOP initiative provides teaching tools, grants, and support for the EOP Network —a volunteer action network— comprising diverse stakeholders collectively seeking to transform engineering education to equip all engineers with the understanding, knowledge, skills, and mindsets to ensure their work contributes to a healthy world. The EOP Framework, a fundamental resource of the initiative, provides a curated and vetted list of ABET-aligned sustainability-focused student learning outcomes, including core and advanced. It covers social and environmental sustainability topics and essential professional skills such as communication, teamwork, and critical thinking. It was designed as a practical implementation tool — rather than a research framework — to help educators embed sustainability concepts and tools into engineering courses and programs at all levels. The Lemelson Foundation has provided a range of grants to support curricular transformation efforts using the EOP Framework. With support from The Lemelson Foundation, ASEE launched an EOP Mini-Grant Program in 2022 to engender curricular changes using the EOP Framework. The EOP Network is working to extend the reach of the Framework across the ASEE community beyond initial pilot programs by implementing an EOP Toolkit for EOP Network members and other stakeholders to use at their home institutions, conferences, and informative workshops. This article describes the rationale for creating the EOP Toolkit, the development process, content examples, and use scenarios.

@inproceedings{Schulz23-ASEE-EOP,
  title = {A Toolkit for Expanding Sustainability Engineering Utilizing Foundations of the Engineering for One Planet Initiative},
  author = {Schulz, Andrew and Anderson, Cynthia D. and Cooper, Cindy and Roberts, Dustyn and Loyo, Jorge and Lewis, Kristin and Kumar, Supraja and Rolf, Julianna and Marulanda, Nelson A. Granda},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE)},
  address = {Baltimore, USA},
  month = jun,
  year = {2023},
  note = {Andrew Schulz, Cindy Cooper, Cindy Anderson contributed equally. },
  doi = {},
  month_numeric = {6}
}