Community Outreach and Engagement through Sustainability

Jane Fraser, Leonardo Bedoya-Valencia, Jude DePalma, Nebojsa Jaksic, Ananda Paudel, Hüseyin Sarper, Ding Yuan
2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings   unpublished
Many communities and many engineering programs embrace the need to study and practice sustainability. Human activities must be designed to allow this generation to meet its needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainability is often described as requiring attention to the triple bottom line: people, planet and prosperity. This paper presents background concerning the incorporation of sustainability into engineering, for example, in the student
more » ... es of ABET criteria and in the codes of ethics of some engineering disciplines. We focus on describing and analyzing the efforts toward sustainability being taken in our community and the efforts of our engineering department to incorporate sustainability throughout our curriculum. We describe the methods we are using, starting with an intensive 4-day summer workshop (including a community college faculty member), which resulted in action items including plans to alter specific courses. We also describe the Department of Education funded grant that is supporting this work to incorporate sustainability, service learning, and advances in educational technology in all STEM programs at our university. Unique features of these community and university efforts include the involvement of all faculty members in our department in the project and as authors on this paper and the increasing involvement of engineering faculty and students in our community"s sustainability efforts.
doi:10.18260/1-2--19318 fatcat:6ztis4u6yndh3ftfhixgsv3an4