Multidiscipline Team Teaching Approach To Enhance Project Based Learning Of Sustainable Design

This paper describes a multidiscipline team-taught course providing a project-based learning environment for students of sustainable design practices at the university level. The Sustainability Practicum course developed by the authors at the University of Utah aims to integrate students from multiple disciplines with faculty and design professional mentors, also from multiple disciplines. Multidiscipline student teams are first provided a basic introduction to sustainability concepts and then introduced to an on-going building or development project, environmental assessment, or coupled human-natural process investigation for which they must incorporate a sustainable feature. By using active projects for the course, students are immersed directly into the planning and design experience providing them insight into stakeholder-clientdecision maker-professional practice interactions. Students become involved in these interactions as they innovate, plan, design, and in some cases create, implement, or construct their sustainability project. This paper describes the challenges and benefits of the multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning sustainability concepts and the value of using on-going projects and involving design professionals.