The Final Straw: Incorporating Accessibility and Sustainability Considerations into Material Selection Decisions

Gelles, Laura A.; Lord, Susan M.

doi:10.18260/1-2--35319

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…The authors of this study consist of four faculty members from the Integrated Engineering department (SML, GDH, DAC, JAM) and the first author (LAG), who is a postdoctoral research associate hired under an NSF Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments (RED) grant that the school of engineering received to develop "Changemaking" engineers by redefining the engineering canon as sociotechnical [49]. LAG was situated closely to the IntE department both in proximity (e.g., housed in the same building before the stay at home order) and in curricular and research interests [50][51][52]. As such, LAG's expertise has been utilized to conduct observations, interviews, and focus groups for IntE faculty.…”

Section: Researcher Position In the Casementioning

confidence: 99%

Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

et al. 2020

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The global pandemic of COVID-19 brought about the transition to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) at higher education institutions across the United States, prompting both students and the faculty to rapidly adjust to a different modality of teaching and learning. Other crises have induced disruptions to academic continuity (e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes), but not to the same extent as COVID-19, which has affected universities on a global scale. In this paper, we describe a qualitative case study where we interviewed 11 second-year Integrated Engineering students during the Spring 2020 semester to explore how they adapted to the transition to remote learning. Our results revealed several student challenges, how they used self-discipline strategies to overcome them, and how the faculty supported students in the classroom through a compassionate and flexible pedagogy. Faculty members showed compassion and flexibility by adjusting the curriculum and assessment and effectively communicating with students. This was especially important for the women participants in this study, who more frequently expressed utilizing pass/fail grading and the personal and gendered challenges they faced due to the pandemic. During this unprecedented crisis, we found that a key element for supporting students’ well-being and success is the faculty members communicating care and incorporating flexibility into their courses.

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Section: Researcher Position In the Casementioning

confidence: 99%

Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

et al. 2020

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“…No longer can our classes have a narrow focus on technical problem solving. Instead, we must strive to train the sociotechnical engineer-someone capable of addressing the intertwined social and technical elements of a problem [5][6][7][8]. To be successful in solving these problems, we argue that engineering students must learn to understand the complex cultures, ways of knowing, and ecosystems in which engineered systems exist [9,10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Integrated Approach to Energy Education in Engineering

et al. 2020

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What do engineering students in 2020 need to know about energy to be successful in the workplace and contribute to addressing society’s issues related to energy? Beginning with this question, we have designed a new course for second-year engineering students. Drawing on the interdisciplinary backgrounds of our diverse team of engineering instructors, we aimed to provide an introduction to energy for all engineering students that challenged the dominant discourse in engineering by valuing students’ lived experiences and bringing in examples situated in different cultural contexts. An Integrated Approach to Energy was offered for the first time in Spring 2020 for 18 students. In this paper, we describe the design of the course including learning objectives, content, and pedagogical approach. We assessed students’ learning using exams and the impact of the overall course using interviews. Students demonstrated achievement of the learning objectives in technical areas. In addition, interviews revealed that they learned about environmental, economic, and social aspects of engineering practice. We intend for this course to serve as a model of engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor by challenging students with scenarios that are technically demanding and require critical thinking about contextual implications.

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“…Additionally, they primarily focused on economic and environmental aspects of sustainability over social [13]. This focus on the economic and environmental aspects of the triple bottom line of sustainability was also found within a materials science course [15,58,59]. Even in industry, research shows that practicing engineers approached sustainable design from solution focused (i.e., finding a narrow solution to meet the client's needs) and problem focused (i.e., iteratively identifying and coconstructing the problem with the client to produce a set of requirements for the solution) ways.…”

Section: Engineering Problem Solving and Sustainabilitymentioning

confidence: 91%

Is It All about Efficiency? Exploring Students’ Conceptualizations of Sustainability in an Introductory Energy Course

et al. 2021

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Engineers are increasingly called on to develop sustainable solutions to complex problems. Within engineering, however, economic and environmental aspects of sustainability are often prioritized over social ones. This paper describes how efficiency and sustainability were conceptualized and interrelated by students in a newly developed second-year undergraduate engineering course, An Integrated Approach to Energy. This course took a sociotechnical approach and emphasized modern energy concepts (e.g., renewable energy), current issues (e.g., climate change), and local and personal contexts (e.g., connecting to students’ lived experiences). Analyses of student work and semi-structured interview data were used to explore how students conceptualized sustainability and efficiency. We found that in this cohort (n = 17) students often approached sustainability through a lens of efficiency, believing that if economic and environmental resources were prioritized and optimized, sustainability would be achieved. By exploring sustainability and efficiency together, we examined how dominant discourses that privilege technical over social aspects in engineering can be replicated within an energy context.

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The Final Straw: Incorporating Accessibility and Sustainability Considerations into Material Selection Decisions

Cited by 8 publications

References 10 publications

Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

Compassionate Flexibility and Self-Discipline: Student Adaptation to Emergency Remote Teaching in an Integrated Engineering Energy Course during COVID-19

An Integrated Approach to Energy Education in Engineering

Is It All about Efficiency? Exploring Students’ Conceptualizations of Sustainability in an Introductory Energy Course

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