Speaker: Dr. Alexander Dale | Engineers for a Sustainable World
Coauthor: Justin Hess | Engineering Education | Purdue University
Modern engineering practice faces a new set of sustainability-related constraints around resource availability, aging infrastructure, and global challenges such as climate change. Many of these challenges have some or all of the characteristics of ‘wicked’ problems, which lack definitive formulations, include many stakeholders and disciplines, and have better or worse responses rather than right or wrong solutions. Engagement with these problems requires students to consider numerous stakeholders, form a holistic understanding of the system, and to collaborate with individuals from diverse backgrounds in order to develop a meaningful response. Experience with wicked problems in engineering education is critical, but is difficult and lacking at many institutions.
In response to this need, we will discuss the Wicked Problems in Sustainable Engineering (WPSE) multi-university initiative. WPSE provides a community and professional expertise for a shared annual problem each year. Faculty and students across institutions work through distinct components of the same wicked problem in design teams, but have access to each other, professional mentors, and participating faculty through digital environments, creating a multi-disciplinary community. Institutions can integrate the problem content and background modules into existing courses, or offer new courses based on available curricula and syllabi.
WPSE was piloted at the University of Pittsburgh and Rochester Institute of Technology during the Fall of 2014, and the wicked problem students worked through was Roots of Air Pollution. The participating faculty of the pilot run are working with additional schools for the Fall 2015 offering. This presentation will present WPSE as a flexible set of content for use in many different situations. Implications from the pilot run will be used to inform future directions of the program, specifically how it might meet its learning objectives related to critical thinking, developing students’ awareness of their professional responsibilities, and students’ confidence in working through sustainability problems.