Working with “Others”: Developing Sustainability Skills in the First Year Engineering Classroom

Abstract

While engineering education excels at training students to solve well-defined and highly structured problems, it struggles to support the development of students’ abilities to address highly complex, ill-structured, and contested engineering problems that lack in definite solutions, where engineers are called on to work with non-engineers in a transdisciplinary environment. The challenge for engineering educators is to develop and teach constructively aligned curricula aimed at developing transdisciplinary skills so that, as practitioners, graduating engineering students contribute to addressing these types of problems within transdisciplinary environments.
 Efforts are underway in many institutions to close the gap between the transdisciplinary needs in practice and current engineering curricula. At the University of British Columbia (UBC), a team of faculty members and engineering practitioners have recently developed and are teaching a design-focused engineering course to all first year students. In this paper we, a subset of UBC’s teaching team, present the argument for teaching skills to engineering students that support transdisciplinary. Wesummarize the definitions of these skills found in the literature, and we speculate that the development of one aspect of transdisciplinary is related to personal development. Specifically, we hypothesize that systems thinking is correlated to metacognition. We describe an experimental strategy for testing the hypothesis within a first year engineering program, then we present and discuss preliminary test results.

Crossing Boundaries: Developing Transdisciplinary Skills in Engineering Education

“…The results of the current research include 1) a discussion of what constitutes transdisciplinary skills in engineering education; 2) a description and analysis of an evaluation approach of transdisciplinary skills; and 3) insights about the pedagogical practice of systems thinking, empathy and metacognition in first year engineering curricula. The present study extends the preliminary work [8] and further explores the pedagogical development and assessment of transdisciplinary skills.…”

Developing transdisciplinarity in first‐year engineering

“…Although not a focus of the current study, here we report quantitative data (Table 3) replicating prior exploratory studies (Ellis et al, 2016; Nesbit et al, 2017; Ostafichuk et al, 2016; Tan et al, 2018), which were collected using the Transdisciplinary Skills Survey Instrument (Tan et al, 2018). The instrument is a self‐assessment online survey consisting of 5‐point Likert‐type ratings of agreement and disagreement with items on empathic thinking (7 items), metacognition (18 items), and attitudes about systems thinking (14 items).…”

“…More practically, while there is ample literature on subdomains such as “perspective taking and tolerance for the ideas of others” (Gupta et al, 2016; Haws, 2001; Jaycox et al, 2014), our selection of the three indicators of transdisciplinary knowledge (highlighting the relatively bigger shaded ovals compared with that of tolerance and perspective taking as shown in Figure 1) was based on the University of British Columbia's (UBC) Graduating Student Sustainability Attributes (Marcus et al, 2015), Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board Graduate Attributes (EngineersCanada, 2022; Table 2), and the authors' research interests and initial exploratory studies (Ellis et al, 2016; Nesbit et al, 2017; Ostafichuk et al, 2016; Tan et al, 2018; Section 3). Furthermore, the selected indicators also align well with the learning activities described in Section 5.1.…”

“…The courses are part of the core first‐year program taken by all incoming engineering students. Here, we build on our quantitative exploratory investigations (Nesbit et al, 2017; Tan et al, 2018) into the influence, on transdisciplinary knowledge development, of specific learning activities designed to develop engineering attributes related to sustainability, design, and professional practice.…”