2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Higher education is responsible for educating and empowering future leaders on issues of international importance such as climate change. Existing research suggests engineering education may be particularly important sustainability issues by educating students on the role of technology in addressing climate change. To do so successfully, instructors must employ pedagogical strategies that will be impactful and meaningful to students, inspiring them towards behaviors that address sustainability in their personal and professional lives. Recent literature suggests active learning strategies in sustainability education, here defined as “transformative process that brings together knowledge artifacts, learning contexts, human, and social problems as well as challenges for the present and future of our societies (Misseyanni, 2018, xviii),” can help promote students’ climate change behaviors and leadership development.

This paper draws on the three-pronged competency approach, which demonstrates how students’ (a) knowledge, (b) attitudes, and (c) behaviors related to sustainability and climate work in tandem to positively reinforce one another. This research investigates the relationship between the three prongs (i.e., knowledge, attitudes, behaviors) to attain a more holistic understanding of student learning outcomes. In the present study, we recognize students’ curricular and co-curricular learning experiences as integral to students’ knowledge production. We also recognize students’ futures thinking about climate change as an important attitude related to climate change. Finally, we recognize the degree to which students engage in activism as an important behavioral outcome of their learning experiences in higher education. As such, we explore the relationship between the degree to which instructors employ active learning strategies, students’ futures thinking attitudes, and students’ likelihood of engaging in activist behaviors.

Using survey data (N = 220) from students who reported that an engineering course taught them the most about sustainability at a large, public, Midwestern university, we examined the relationship between the degree to which students believed their sustainability-related engineering courses employed active learning pedagogies and their self-reported likelihood of engaging in sustainability-related activism behaviors. We used exploratory factor analysis on scales measuring instructional strategies for supporting students’ knowledge growth, sustainability actions and behaviors, and attitudes about sustainability topics (i.e., futures thinking). We then estimated an OLS regression model to understand the relationships between these variables.

Our results indicated a positive relationship between active learning strategies and students’ likelihood of engaging in sustainability-related behaviors. For example, students who reported that their engineering courses employed active learning strategies (i.e., case studies, group discussions, class debates) reported a higher likelihood of engaging in sustainability-related activism behaviors. Furthermore, we found a positive relationship between futures thinking and sustainability-related activism behaviors, indicating that students who reported spending time thinking about climate change and its future impact also reported being more likely to engage in activism behaviors to mitigate climate change, holding gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (i.e., income) variables constant. Collectively, futures thinking and active learning experiences accounted for approximately 33% of the variance in the dataset. We discuss implications for teaching and learning in engineering education.