BBISS Hosts Sustainable Engineering Educators

College and university engineering educators from around the country convened at Georgia Tech to learn how to integrate sustainability into their engineering curriculum and pedagogy. About 35 participants from a wide spectrum of engineering specialties worked with experts in the field of sustainable engineering and shared their experiences to advance the state of the art in sustainable engineering education. The two day workshop is an annual event offered by the Center for Sustainable Engineering. The CSE is a partnership of five universities: Syracuse University (lead institution), Arizona State University, Carnegie-Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Texas at Austin and is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Center is dedicated to helping engineering professors update their courses, and develop new ones, to account for the rapidly changing global conditions that are transforming the practice of engineering.

Workshop participants are encouraged to not only apply what they learned in the workshop to their curriculum, but to share their curriculum as modules for anyone to use through the CSE’s Electronic Database. Modules are peer reviewed in a similar fashion to an academic journal article. This ensures that just as the variety of topics covered expands, the credibility of the content is maintained at a very high standard.  Among the reviewers are former participants in the workshops.

The workshop also serves as a catalyst for building a community of sustainable engineering teachers and practitioners.  It is hoped that as participants implement the principles and concepts of sustainable engineering in their classrooms, they will share their experiences with their colleagues, and through their curriculum modules, with the wider community of engineering educators.