Integrating Sustainability Into Courses Across The Engineering Curriculum: A Faculty Workshop Model

The incorporation of the concepts of sustainability into all engineering projects will be a critical challenge for future engineers. All projects, not simply those that are obviously environmental in scope, are subject to material, energy, and natural resource constraints, and all have an impact on the interactions between the human and natural worlds. To help students understand these needs, faculty at Purdue University have begun to incorporate the concept of “normalized sustainability”: the idea that sustainability concerns are normal engineering design criteria, on the same level as more traditional constraints, such as cost, reliability, and performance. This approach requires a cross-cutting coverage of sustainability and environmental issues. They can not simply be presented in one “specialized” course, but instead need to permeate courses throughout the curriculum and at all levels. To facilitate the incorporation of environmental and sustainability concepts into a variety of courses, we held a two-day faculty workshop during the summer of 2009. Participants learned important concepts, discussed appropriate pedagogical techniques and locations, and were able to share ideas of how to infuse sustainability into examples, case studies, problem sets, and choices of material coverage. More than twenty-five faculty and staff from nine disciplines of engineering participated. These participants have since begun to work on specific modules to apply to their courses during the 2009-10 school year. This paper presents the structure of the workshop, the main conclusions and ideas from the workshop, and examples and assessment of ways that sustainability concepts can be seamlessly inserted into courses so as to further the goals of normalized sustainability.