Civil And Environmental Engineering Education (Ceee) Transformational Change: Tools And Strategies For Sustainability Integration And Assessment In Engineering Education

This paper is based on a new project recently funded by the National Science Foundation which focuses on addressing some of the current barriers to integrating sustainability into engineering education – creating effective learning materials and proving the effectiveness of new teaching strategies – that enables engineering faculty to more easily incorporate sustainability approaches into curricula. The objectives of the project are to design, develop, implement, disseminate, and assess the success and effectiveness of the proposed transformational learning practices and peerto-peer networks. The paper begins with a brief overview of the entire project and then focuses on: 1) the components of a new textbook created for an Introduction to Environmental Engineering course and 2) identical Green Engineering courses to be offered at partner universities that build upon the introductory course. The concept of incorporating and leveraging Fink's taxonomy of significant learning in the textbook and the course design is introduced and discussed. The paper also discusses how the textbook and the teaching/learning practices employed in the green engineering courses align with principles for good practice in undergraduate education and demonstrated successful teaching methods in engineering education.