NLI: Design and Development: Cross disciplinary co-teaching sustainability across the formal and informal engineering undergraduate curriculum

About This Grant

Over the past two decades, efforts to reduce waste, reuse materials, and design products to last have become more important in how we approach business, design, and engineering. These ideas are foundational to a circular economy, wherein landfill waste is significantly reduced, and central to global efforts to fight climate change. As such, teaching engineering students the concepts of sustainability is now critical, yet many college programs focus mostly on theory and hypothetical scenarios. Hands-on experiences that help students connect classroom learning to real-world challenges are distinctly lacking. These endeavors can include working with local community partners, collaborating with businesses, or using creative spaces like makerspaces. This project proposes an approach that addresses these deficits: embedding sustainability into core courses using faculty expertise that already exists within the school, developing a new course that pairs undergraduate students with community partners and industry to tackle real-world challenges, and transforming how students learn about sustainability outside of the classroom, such as in makerspaces and independent research projects. Ultimately, helping students see themselves as engineers and sustainability problem solvers is critical to the future engineering workforce. As design and sustainability become increasingly integral to the engineering profession, we must support students in building a strong sense of identity in this field so they are prepared to solve sustainability challenges for and with society moving forward. This research will be aligned with the NSF-Lemelson Initiative on Environmental and Social Sustainability in Engineering Education by embedding critical Engineering for One Planet skills into the core curriculum for design engineering and applying the skills through collaboration with community partners and regional industry. The overarching goal of this research is to activate our teaching team’s collective expertise in differing facets of the Engineering for One Planet (EOP) framework to develop a co-teaching paradigm for the design engineering undergraduate curriculum at Brown University. The objectives are to (1) design and implement a mini-module framework that activates co-teaching to infuse sustainability across the design engineering curriculum, (2) investigate how students identify as sustainable design engineers through formal and informal educational experiences, and (3) characterize and identify opportunities to build a co-teaching community to enrich faculty teaching, community, and research experiences. We will accomplish these objectives through the integration of mini-modules into existing courses, building a new cornerstone course that partners engineering students with local industry and community partners, and by developing student-led independent research experiences with partnering faculty. In addition to these formal education strategies, we will work to transform our campus makerspace into an informal sustainable engineering facility, thus reaching beyond course instruction. We will utilize interviews, focus groups, surveys, and course evaluations to measure impact and guide iteration. This project will be led by faculty and senior personnel with expertise in design, engineering, mathematics, management, and the learning sciences. The expected outcomes are: (1) a framework that demonstrates that co-teaching through a mini-modules initiative is a scalable, cost-neutral model for embedding sustainability across the engineering curriculum while enhancing pedagogical collaboration and student engagement; and (2) a blueprint to transforming makerspaces into a sustainability ‘living lab’ that cultivates community-based innovation, strengthens cross-institutional networks, and positions these spaces as a regional hub for sustainable design education. This project is funded by the Division of Engineering Education & Centers with additional support provided by The Lemelson Foundation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.