2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Integrating Environmental Justice into Civil and Environmental Engineering Curricula

Presented at Environmental Engineering Division (ENVIRON) Technical Session 1 - Sustainability & Environmental Justice

It is well established that communities of color experience disproportionate exposure to environmental contaminants producing negative health outcomes and undue environmental justice challenges. Many of the exposures and infrastructure inequalities are legacies of residential racial segregation, such as redlining and underbounding. While the environmental justice movement has made great strides in incorporating public health research into these issues, there has been less effort focused on integrating environmental engineering training into the movement. This paper describes research on developing and implementing a suite of integrated, interdisciplinary, community-engaged, anti-racism training opportunities for civil and environmental engineering undergraduates to build capacity for addressing environmental justice challenges. For this project, we integrate environmental engineering, applied anthropology, and Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education to redesign existing civil and environmental engineering courses to include equitable development within a particular community. The redesigned curriculum provides broader educational training to address environmental engineering challenges, meet community identified needs, and considers the impacts of structural racism. Our initial focus is within a historic urban Black community in the southeast, where our work explores urban infrastructure, stormwater, brownfields, food security, and job creation among other issues. The project is also studying the impacts of the new curriculum on student perceptions of racism and justice and on faculty interest and capacity for catalyzing additional curricular and co-curricular change. Initial collaborations from the community-based research have included diverse communication tools to share information with and about the community.

Authors

Dr. Michelle Henderson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7022-3785 University of South Florida [biography]

Michelle Henderson, PhD is an American Society of Engineering Education and National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is an environmental engineer with interdisciplinary research focused on sustainability, community engaged research, environmental justice, and engineering education.
Dr. Maya A. Trotz University of South Florida [biography]

Maya A. Trotz is Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida. She holds a BS in Chemical Engineering with a minor in Theater from MIT and MSc and PhD degrees in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Stanford Universi
Dr. E. Christian Wells University of South Florida [biography]

Dr. E. Christian Wells is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida (USF), where he has served as the Founding Director of the Office of Sustainability (2009-2012) and as Deputy Director of the Patel School of Global Sustainab
Dr. Maya Elizabeth Carrasquillo University of California, Berkeley [biography]

Maya E. Carrasquillo, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a BS in Environmental Engineering with a minor in History from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of South Florida.
Dr. Ruthmae Sears [biography]

Ruthmae Sears, Ph.D., is a Professor at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on curriculum issues, the development of reasoning and proof skills, clinical experiences in secondary mathematics, and the integration of technology
Katherine Ann Alfredo University of South Florida [biography]

Dr. Katherine Alfredo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of South Florida. Dr. Alfredo’s research focuses on sustainable potable water provisions to include technical treatment and regulatory policy in both the U.S. and internationally. As a 2015 Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Scholar, Dr. Alfredo investigated rurally implemented drinking water treatment plants in India. Prior to joining the faculty at USF, she was a Research Program Manager at DC Water. She holds a Professional Engineering license in the state of Virginia.
Dr. Deirdre Cobb-Roberts University of South Florida [biography]

Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Ph.D., is a Professor of Social Foundations and Department Chair of the Department of Educational and Psychological Studies at the University of South Florida. She was previously a McKnight Junior Faculty Fellow. Her research focuses on gendered racism experienced by Black women in faculty and administrative positions within higher education institutions. Additionally, she explores how Black women administrators facilitate institutional change, address systemic imbalances or inequality, and modify practices. Her work examines the power structures that shape the interpretation of institutional climates, cultures, experiences, mentoring practices, and performance evaluations of Black women administrators. Dr. Cobb-Roberts has published extensively in journals such as the American Educational Research Journal, Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning, and NASPA Journal about Women in Higher Education, as well as book chapters. She has co-edited the book Schools as Imagined Communities: The Creation of Identity, Meaning and Conflict in U.S. History, co-authored Black Women, Academe, and the Tenure Process in the United States and the Caribbean, and recently completed a third co-edited book titled Mentoring as Critically Engaged Praxis: Storying the lives and Contributions of Black Women Administrators.

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