2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Integrating Sustainability into Engineering Education: Building a Pathway to Scale

Presented at Environmental Engineering Division (ENVIRON) Technical Session 2

Sustainability, including environmental and social sustainability, has been identified across all sectors, from government to industry to academia, as a critical area for action. Sustainability goals and actions, by necessity, require input from many fields, but engineers play a potentially outsized role due to the structures and products they build, and the associated choices they make. The Engineering for One Planet (EOP) initiative aims to address this challenge by ensuring all future engineers, no matter their discipline, are equipped with the skills, knowledge, understanding, and mindsets to design, build, and create in sustainable ways. Much has been achieved to date by the EOP initiative, through a process of multi-stakeholder engagement, in both understanding and piloting solutions to realize the EOP vision. However, in order to achieve the far reaching systemic changes desired, a roadmap for a Collective Impact-informed, cross-sector, collaborative initiative was developed. This roadmap leverages the approaches yielded from the recent National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded EOP Scaling for Impact Workshop, the lessons learned and results achieved from the initiative to date, and key considerations drawn from a Collective Impact approach that centers equity. This roadmap calls for stakeholders—including academia, industry, accrediting and professional organizations, community organizations, non-profits, funders, and those communities most impacted by the negative impacts of environmental and social sustainability challenges— to move beyond singular programmatic interventions, and instead work to collaboratively understand and construct coordinated solutions, to integrating sustainability into engineering education and the engineering profession. The roadmap’s call to action invites collaborators to join this initiative and engage with the roadmap as a starting point for their work together; the roadmap provides immediate action steps, and invites collaborators to further shape the roadmap into a collective, achievable plan for systems change, that they, their institutions/organizations, and other cross-sector collaborators can embrace. For systems change is never complete and the solutions not finite; it is only through ongoing, collective action that we can fully understand, and learn how to address the lack of sustainability in engineering as the complex, social problem it is.

Authors

Ms. Victoria Matthew Engineering for One Planet [biography]

Victoria is the Network Manager for the Engineering for One Planet Network, an action network committed to transforming engineering education so all engineers are equipped with the understanding, knowledge, and skills to ensure their work contributes to a healthy world for lifetimes to come. Victoria is also a partner at Broadening Impacts, an organization that partners with researchers to get their knowledge out into the world. Prior to that Victoria led VentureWell’s Community of Practice and social learning initiatives, their collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Frontier Set, a network of 31 post-secondary institutions working to close the student opportunity gap, and the NSF funded Pathways to Innovation program, a network of 50 post-secondary institutions working to embed innovation and entrepreneurship into undergraduate engineering.
Cynthia Anderson Alula Consulting [biography]

Cindy Anderson (she/her/hers) is the founder and CEO of Alula Consulting. Cindy specializes in innovative sustainability- and online-focused research and curriculum projects for academic institutions, non-profits, government and corporations. Cindy has taught thousands of people through courses and workshops, around the world and online, in the fields of biology, sustainability and biomimicry. She is honored to be a collaborative partner on the Engineering for One Planet initiative since its inception, co-author of the EOP Framework and new framework integration guides, and active EOP Network Member. Cindy holds a MS from Oregon State University, a MEd from Griffith University (Queensland, Australia), and a BSc in biology from the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada).
Cindy Cooper http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7253-4042 The Lemelson Foundation [biography]

As a Senior Program Officer for The Lemelson Foundation, Cindy focuses on The Lemelson Foundation’s higher education efforts, including Invention Education, which supports equitable and inclusive efforts to equip students with inventive skillsets and mindsets, and Engineering for One Planet, an effort to equip tomorrow’s engineers with the skills, knowledge and understanding to protect and improve our planet and our lives.
For more than 20 years, Cindy has fostered social and environmental impact through innovation, working across academic, philanthropic, business and entrepreneurship fields. She co-founded and led award-winning organizations and programs in higher education and international development, including the world’s first website for fair trade Spanish lessons through videoconferencing. Cindy received a 40 Under 40 Award in 2013, and her work has been featured in Fast Company magazine, Stanford Social Innovation Review and NPR.
A Brazilian American, she speaks English, Portuguese and Spanish and holds a Global MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management with distinction and a Psychology/Spanish BA summa cum laude from Claremont McKenna College.
Surbhi Godsay Lipkin-Moore Amplify Evaluation

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