2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As the challenges facing civil and environmental engineers grow increasingly complex, future professionals must be trained not only with technical competence but also with the ability to communicate, reflect, and reason ethically about sustainability trade-offs. However, writing in engineering education is often confined to formal reports rather than being used as an active learning tool that promotes professional judgment and critical thinking. This Work-in-Progress project integrates Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) principles into a senior level engineering design course to promote reflective and ethical reasoning embedded in technical design. In collaboration with the CSU Writing Center, the course was redesigned to include multiple short, design-connected writing activities distributed throughout the semester. These iterative, low-stakes assignments replaced one major paper and are intentionally aligned with course milestones. Examples include reflections, stakeholder impact analyses, and final self-assessments connecting sustainability, ethics, and design decisions. Students are prompted to articulate their reasoning through questions formulated to guide their thinking process.
Preliminary results indicate that these scaffolded writing assignments enhance student engagement, deepen understanding of sustainability concepts, and strengthen the articulation of ethical reasoning. Qualitative feedback and rubric-based assessments suggest that writing-to-learn activities help students make meaningful connections between technical content, professional ethics, and societal impact.
This work contributes a replicable model for integrating WAC principles into engineering design education. By embedding writing as a reflective and analytical tool rather than an endpoint, the project advances ABET-aligned outcomes related to communication, ethics, and lifelong learning, while preparing students to design solutions that are both technically sound and socially responsible.