2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Inequity in infrastructure has been an expanding research area in recent years. For future civil and environmental engineering projects to positively serve all communities in a changing world, young engineers need to be prepared to address inequity and understand how engineering projects may affect all members of the communities they work in. Professional engineers and engineering educators both have begun to consider social justice in engineering in their work. Many colleges throughout the United States have implemented changes to their engineering curriculum to address intersections of engineering and social justice. This study seeks to determine how environmental engineering students view inequity in infrastructure, and evaluate curricular enhancements designed to teach engineering students about social justice in engineering. Ultimately, these curricular enhancements serve to develop sociotechnical design approaches and allow engineers to center community in their infrastructure projects.
Potential approaches for civil and environmental engineers to focus on community in infrastructure projects have been proposed with the goal of mitigating past injustice and preventing further inequity. A Community Centered Design approach suggests that development of questions through community engagement and discussion may provide better guidance for practicing engineers and offer greater educational opportunities for engineering students than a traditional solely technical design approach. When designing for a community, engineers should consider themselves first to be creating infrastructure to serve the people, rather than as experts who are there to solve a problem. By learning to ask questions that may have multiple and possibly contradictory answers, community centered engineers can get a better understanding of the community and its needs. Developing this sociotechnical approach is best developed as part of an engineering education.
To determine how to prepare engineering students to design for community, this study focused first on understandings students’ ideas about social justice in an engineering context. A survey and social-justice focused curricular enhancements were delivered to a first-year introductory environmental engineering course each year between Fall 2020 and Fall 2023. Follow-up interviews were conducted with senior-level students who received the Fall 2020 interventions in their first year. The initial surveys showed that engineering students may be less aware of injustice in California than they are of inequity globally and indicated that only about a third of environmental engineering students surveyed consider community impacts when defining environmental engineering. These results suggest that helping students see social justice an issue in their own communities, rather than as isolated to other part of the world, may help them begin to develop community centered design thinking. The surveys and interviews further indicated the potential for these kinds of curricular enhancements to have a positive impact on students’ awareness of inequity, understanding of social justice, overall critical thinking skills, and ability to utilize a community-centered design approach as professionals.