TUES Type 1: A Sustainability Toolbox for Engineers

这个TUES 1型项目正在创建一个可持续发展工具箱，并评估传统和非传统教学方法的组合，以培训工程师成为能够在道德和能力上将关怀转化为可持续发展世界的行动的变革推动者。本项目评估了六种教学策略（干预措施），其中四种在大二阶段，两种在高年级设计阶段。越来越非传统的可持续性教学方法的关键组成部分是：(a)使用戏剧化的视频，在情感上吸引和激励学生关注可持续性问题；(b)使用在线技能培养教程，明确地为学生解决需要更高层次认知技能来制定和解决的“邪恶”问题做好准备。采用PACT（促进、核算、补偿和目标）方法进行可持续性设计，使学生能够将他们对可持续性的意识和责任转化为有意义的行动，无论设计的类型和目的如何。这些战略以消费电子产品为导向，其生命周期仍然是一个不可持续的、广泛扩散的消费野兽，在现代世界几乎没有放缓的迹象。与工程课程的许多其他方面不同，评估可持续性领域的批判性思维或问题解决能力不足以评估学生是否受过良好的培训。相反，学生必须运用这些高水平的思维技能来解决一系列复杂的、相互交织的问题，这些问题往往是在将关心有效地转化为行动的过程中出现的。通过精心设计的一系列以教学可持续性为导向的干预和评估，该项目深入了解了哪种教学方法最有效地提高了学生对技术和可持续性交叉领域中典型的“邪恶”问题的了解。培训工程师不仅要意识到这一点，而且要在关心（并采取行动）可持续性问题方面承担适当的责任和足够的能力，这一点具有广泛的社会影响。开发的干预措施和策略具有被其他工程领域采用/调整的潜力。通过解决一个重要的社会问题，如可持续发展，并显示工程师在解决这个问题的重要作用，一些学生可能会更吸引工程作为一个职业，更有可能留在这个领域。此外，将可持续性与技术联系起来的干预措施可以用来增强工程作为一种直接造福社会的职业的形象，从而使工程更广泛地吸引K-16课程各个阶段的学生。

This TUES Type 1 project is creating a sustainability toolbox and evaluating a combination of traditional and non-traditional teaching pedagogy applied toward training engineers to be change agents capable of ethically and competently converting care into action for a sustainable world. This project evaluates six teaching strategies (interventions) within an ethics of care approach, four at the sophomore level and two at the senior design level. Key components of increasingly non-traditional approaches to teaching sustainability are: (a) the use of dramatized video to emotionally engage and motivate students in problems of sustainability and (b) the use of online skill building tutorials that explicitly prepare the student to solve "wicked" problems that require higher order cognitive skills to formulate and address. The PACT (Promoting, Accounting, Compensating, and Targeting) approach to designing for sustainability is incorporated, so that students can transform their awareness of and responsibility for sustainability into meaningful action, regardless of the type and purpose of design. The strategies are oriented around consumer electronics, whose life cycle remains an unsustainable, widely proliferating beast of consumption that shows little sign of slowing in the modern world. Unlike many other facets of the engineering curriculum, evaluating critical thinking or problem solving in the area of sustainability is not enough to assess whether a student is trained well. Instead, the student must use these high-level thinking skills in often unstructured series of complex, interwoven problems that are situated in an effective transformation of care into action. Through a carefully designed series of interventions and assessments oriented around teaching sustainability, this project offers insight into what teaching approaches work best for improving student learning about the "wicked" problems typically found at the intersection of technology and sustainability.The importance of training engineers not simply to be aware but also to be appropriately responsible and sufficiently competent in caring about (and acting on) sustainability issues has broad societal impacts. The developed interventions and strategies have the potential to be adopted/adapted by other engineering fields. By addressing an important social issue such as sustainability and showing the important role of engineers in solving this problem, some students might be more attracted to engineering as a career and be more likely to remain in the field. In addition, interventions that connect sustainability to technology can be used to enhance the image of engineering as a career that directly benefits society, thereby enabling engineering to appeal more broadly to students at all stages in K-16 pathways.