2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The climate crisis and environmental degradation are among today’s biggest challenges. These challenges can be addressed or exacerbated through engineering activities, leading industry to increasingly seek engineers who are as well-versed in technological expertise as they are in social and environmental sustainability and climate action. However, engineering students are not typically graduating with the skills, knowledge, and experiences needed to protect and improve our planet and our lives.

The Engineering for One Planet (EOP) initiative seeks to change the course of engineering education to reflect the growing urgency to incorporate fundamental climate and sustainability topics into all engineering disciplines. Catalyzed by The Lemelson Foundation and VentureWell in 2020 —in collaboration with hundreds of contributors from across geographies, lived experience, and sectors — EOP seeks to ensure that all engineers are equipped with core skills in social and environmental sustainability, such as sustainable design and lifecycle impacts, and related professional skills, such as teamwork and critical thinking.

Fueled by the input and collaboration of a growing global community, the EOP initiative fosters curricular transformation through three interrelated approaches: 1) developing and sharing teaching resources through community feedback and vetting in diverse courses and programs, 2) funding faculty change efforts and supporting faculty capacity-building, and 3) activating and supporting collaboration among diverse stakeholders across sectors.

In this paper, we focus on the first approach and discuss how these open source teaching resources have been and are being developed, impact to date, and areas for future work. The paper will share the unique ways these resources have been co-created by hundreds of cross-sector stakeholders and used in curricular change efforts across diverse institutions -including Minority-Serving Institutions, R1 and R2 universities, and community colleges-, what lessons are being learned that can help faculty with their efforts to infuse sustainability into their courses, and what else is needed to go beyond changing discrete courses to changing the course of engineering.