The Climate Change Educational Partnership: Climate Change, Engineered Systems, and Society: A Report of Three Workshops (2014)

Chapter 5
FORMAL EDUCATION INTERVENTIONS ON CLIMATE, ENGINEERED SYSTEMS, AND SOCIETY

This chapter draws on presentations at the second and final workshops that described overarching considerations as well as specific examples of effective interventions in engineering education on the subject of climate change.

Challenges of Incorporating Climate Change in Engineering Education

In a session on engineering education at the capstone workshop, Helene Hilger, associate professor emerita of civil and environmental engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, talked about challenges, current programs, and strategies for including climate change in engineering education.²¹

A key challenge is the rate of climate change, which is much faster than the rate of innovation in university engineering courses and curriculum. Furthermore, when new courses are offered, they are most often based on a faculty member’s research or particular passion. As a result, classes are created on a case-by-case basis on topics that are not a regular part of the curriculum. But the alternative, from conception of a new course to its addition by the class registrar, can take a couple of years. There are no supports in the faculty reward system for the creation of new courses. Although teaching is considered in faculty tenure review at many academic institutions, research is often more highly rewarded, and faculty can place themselves at a disadvantage if they take the time and effort to develop new courses.

What’s needed to compensate for these impediments are faculty who are not resistant to the topic of climate change and who are lifelong learners who can create course content from scratch. They also need to be brave enough to be associated with the sometimes controversial topic of climate change, humble enough to work with interdisciplinary faculty on the course, resourceful at gathering new materials on the topic, and generous with their time because they will not get much credit for this work.

Fortunately, a number of educational initiatives are beginning to address the incorporation of climate change in engineering. Among these are the Center for Sustainable Engineering, an NSF- and EPA-sponsored partnership of five universities that offers workshops and web resources for engineering educators (www.csengin.org), and a few university and professional society programs and classes (Box 5.1).

Hilger concluded with some ideas for the project team, colleges and universities, and sponsors to support efforts on climate change education in engineering:

• Create a recognition or certification program for faculty who are early adopters, to be considered in their tenure review.
• Engage the core engineering organizations: professional societies, professional licensing bodies, and accreditation bodies.
• Educate administrators on the importance of climate change engineering education so they can support and recognize their faculty.

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²¹The agenda and video and slides of speakers’ presentations are available at https://www.regonline.com/builder/site/tab2.aspx?EventID=1155563.

• Provide resource support to instructors teaching this material.
• Link grant funding on climate change education to multiple educational institutions within a state.
• Create a website for climate change educators, such as Stanford University’s “Tomorrow’s Professor” website (www.stanford.edu/dept/CTL/Tomprof).
• Create opportunities for students to see companies and employers acting on the importance of climate change and engineering.

Standards and Assessment of Educational Interventions

In a session at the second workshop, Richard Duschl, Waterbury Chair professor of secondary education, College of Education, Pennsylvania State University, reviewed developments and reports produced over the last 10–12 years in the learning sciences, primarily for the K–12 curriculum, that provide useful background information for pedagogical assessment.²² He also outlined work being done to create the Next Generation Science Standards, for which he cochairs the Earth and space science part of the standards. Some of the disciplinary core ideas from the Next Generation Science Standards, specifically those for Earth and space science, are compatible with the concepts that the project team has discussed students should learn, such as the idea of Earth systems and the connection between Earth and human activity.

Duschl echoed the call to align goals, or what he referred to as standards, with the assessment of learning outcomes. Over the past decade much has been learned about learning, and measures and assessment techniques have become more sophisticated, so tools are now available to assess the knowledge and practices that are the goal of education.

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²²Richard Duschl also produced a paper on this topic for the project: “STEM Learning in Context: Opportunities and Challenges from Climate Science and Engineering, 2011, http://www.onlineethics.org/File.aspx?id=28160.

One approach that might be appropriate for the project is learning progression, which involves curriculum that fosters learning over a longer period of time and builds progressively on knowledge presented in previous courses. The project team might also consider both societal expectations of what students should know and the knowledge that students bring into the classroom. Asked to prioritize where the project team could focus its learning science work, Duschl endorsed the project’s attention to problem-based approaches and what preparation employers want.

A helpful approach to identify learning goals is to ask, What would you like a student’s enduring understanding of the course to be (i.e., after four or more years)? In the question and answer period, project co-PI Clark Miller, associate professor of science policy and political science, ASU, commented that if the goal was to “prepare engineering and public administration students who are going to be ready to enter the marketplace” and take leadership roles early in their careers to “help push forward thinking about and tackling the challenges that climate change poses to engineering infrastructure,” then, based on Duschl’s presentation, faculty need to think about developing the learning progression for these knowledge and skill sets.

Effective Interventions (1): Engaging Students for Ethical Action on Climate

Donna Riley, associate professor of engineering at Smith College, made the case that efforts to include climate change, its impacts on engineered systems, and the cross cutting themes in engineering education are “interventions” in the sense that they are out of the ordinary and may even conflict with what’s in the textbooks.

She described the challenges she encountered when she added climate education to a standard engineering course on thermodynamics. Some students complained that the climate content along with the policy and ethics discussions about climate were not what they thought the course was supposed to be about and that these components should not be included in a required course. Motivating the students was crucial—they needed to understand why climate change matters, why it belongs in a thermodynamics class, and why reading, writing, and ethics are important to their education.

But teaching the topic helps students understand that it is naïve to believe that a simple approach, such as recycling or turning off lights, will suffice to address the problem and makes them aware that some people deny that climate change is occurring. Students also need to see faculty supporting this education.

To encourage students and practicing engineers to appreciate the value of good communication skills, Riley created an educational intervention based on Jim Hansen’s book, Storms of My Grandchildren. The author describes his failed efforts in the 1990s to communicate about climate change to the US Congress. He learned that he did not have a clear, succinct story, that his communication was untactful, confusing rather than illuminating, and as a result provoked strong reactions against him.

In a second intervention, Riley introduced a semester-long Climate Action Project designed to (1) get students thinking on the big scale, at the society level, and at the level of engineering detail; (2) connect theory to practice; (3) connect their role as student to that of citizen; and (4) connect the college world to the “real world.” Students were asked to determine how to significantly reduce carbon dioxide levels, in which “significant” meant 1,000 Tg CO₂ equivalent per year (14 percent of US 2010 output, about 1990 levels). Possible student approaches to the project included a small-scale demonstration or analysis of the sorts of structural changes needed to achieve the reduction. Students had to justify their method from a quantitative perspective, qualitative perspective (e.g., feasibility and effectiveness), and ethics perspective. Riley reported that the project had a major impact for some of the students and resulted in personal life changes.

A third educational intervention involved a case study essay on global climate agreements and the challenges of upholding them. This more traditional approach connected with current events and revealed injustices between the global North and South. Students analyzed the ethics (issues such as justice, governance, trust, and public engagement) of a climate agreement, either implemented or unsuccessful, from a variety of philosophical standpoints and stakeholder perspectives.

The final intervention used energy disaster case studies, such as nuclear energy accidents and the Gulf oil spills, to reveal problems with the governance and regulation of energy systems, structural inequalities in decisions about who pays for the costs (not only financial but also environmental and social), questions about responsibility for preventing and responding to such disasters, and the difficulties of designing for “unanticipatable” events. The cases demonstrate that disasters are considered simply “business as usual,” and they raise questions about the feasibility of using nuclear energy to “bail out” of the climate change problem.

Riley concluded by reporting that as a result of her interventions her students enhanced their communication skills, improved critical thinking abilities, developed moral reasoning skills, became more socially engaged, developed some limited community organizing skills, and learned that nontechnical knowledge can complement technical engineering knowledge.

Effective Interventions in Undergraduate Engineering Education

At the second CCEP workshop, organized to examine the educational needs of different audiences from various perspectives,²³ speakers described effective interventions in undergraduate engineering education, particularly innovations that can both improve integration of climate change and engineered systems (CC&ES) in engineering curricula and scale up across institutions. In the first hour of the session invited speakers addressed specific questions that they had received before the meeting:

1. 1) What are the unique challenges and opportunities to integrate CC&ES into engineering curricula?
2. 2) What are the strengths and limitations of attempted innovations to bring new content into the engineering curriculum? Such innovations include
   1. a) Case studies
   2. b) Course modules team-taught by engineering and liberal arts faculty
   3. c) New courses on the particular subject, which are often treated as electives
   4. d) Workshops to prepare engineering faculty to develop and implement their own innovations (e.g., rewrite thermodynamics problems to include climate change)
   5. e) Online repositories (with case studies, readings, problem sets, etc.) that faculty can consult to bring new content into their courses
   6. f) Internally and externally funded grants to faculty to innovate
3. 3) Are there other specific innovations that could be more effective, particularly to encourage faculty from different institutions to adopt them?

In the second hour, four project team members joined the speakers for a panel dialogue to further explore the topics. Audience members submitted questions to a moderator who presented them to the panelists for response.

Project team members Juan Lucena and Jason Delborne of the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) were responsible, respectively, for organizing and moderating the session.

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²³The agenda, video, and slides from the workshop presentations are available at http://www.nae.edu/Projects/CEES/57196/35146/62343/52752.aspx.

A Systems Approach to Educational Interventions

Ann McKenna, chair and professor in the Department of Engineering at the College of Technology and Innovation, Arizona State University, began by emphasizing the importance of aligning the proposed educational approaches (and the reasons for choosing them) with the goal of the project to integrate climate change in the engineering curriculum and with the values of the engineering community, and of assessing that alignment in the evaluation of those approaches.

More broadly, she urged the project team to take an approach that addresses the whole system of engineering education: the institutional structure and core working processes of teaching and learning need to be considered if engineering education is to be truly transformed.

• Changes in institutional pedagogy will require changes in faculty members’ epistemological beliefs about how students learn.
• Institutions must be engaged to support changes in the classroom.
• Pedagogical products will need to be actively diffused (not passively posted on websites).
• Faculty and teachers will need to clearly see both the relative advantage to using them and how to incorporate them in the curriculum.
• Research is needed to identify barriers to changes in the curriculum.

Engineering educators will be key in these efforts to transform education, and can help think through what would be appropriate content and entry points for proposed interventions.

She concluded by encouraging the project team to network with groups that are also seeking to accomplish transformations in education. To that end she cited two 2011 meetings on transforming education. The first was a forum, sponsored by the NAE’s Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education (CASEE), on the impact and diffusion of transformative engineering education innovations.²⁴ The second, a Purdue University meeting titled “Transforming Education: From Innovation to Implementation,” was more broadly focused than engineering education.²⁵

Tribal College Collaborations

Bob Madsen, professor at Chief Dull Knife College, a tribal community college in Montana, described connections that tribal colleges have made in science and engineering as an example for the CCEP team in its efforts to create effective partnerships with these colleges that could bringing CC&ES education into the tribal colleges.

Collaborations that have been the most engaging and productive for education have focused on research projects that resonate with the tribal community, such as the Engineering Research Center on water systems, involving Stanford, CSM, the University of California at Berkeley, and New Mexico State University. He also mentioned two NASA-supported collaborations: an engineering working group that involves 11 tribal colleges to establish preengineering and engineering programs, and tribal college

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²⁴National Academy of Engineering Forum on Impact and Diffusion of Transformative Engineering Education Innovations, February 7–8, 2011; agenda, papers, presentations, and associated materials are available at www.nae.edu/Activities/Projects/CASEE/26338/26183/26293.aspx.

²⁵Purdue University Conference on Transforming Education: From Innovation to Implementation, October 10–12, 2011; agenda available at www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/learningcenter/conference-2011/.

student research using NASA’s “vomit comet” (a reduced-gravity aircraft that simulates the zero gravity environment of space).²⁶

Such collaborations are especially valuable because tribal colleges are generally isolated geographically, which is why they have very good video conferencing capabilities. These collaborations allow students and faculty to become involved with research, which puts the science in context for the students, gets them interested, and connects them with universities. What makes tribal colleges good for modifying curriculum is that, unlike larger universities with engineering schools that have a lot of inertia for changing curriculum, the tribal colleges are usually smaller and can change quickly.

Effective Interventions (2): Constructive Controversy

Karl Smith, professor of cooperative learning in engineering education, Purdue University, began by seconding McKenna’s recommendation to think carefully about the alignment of the educational approaches with the goals and assessment of the project. The project team members should also think about what they want students to know and be able to do. His sense was that, among other aims, the project team wanted to foster conversations among a variety of audiences inside and outside academia, as well as more deep and critical thinking about climate change, engineered systems, and society.

Based on those goals the project might make good use of a pedagogical method known as constructive controversy, which Smith helped develop in the 1970s and 1980s. It is designed to help students understand an issue and its arguments from all sides through a cooperative effort. Students are assigned a position that they prepare, present, and defend; then they switch sides and drop the advocacy component; finally they either come up with a recommendation or identify the best arguments on all sides. Investigators at the University of California at Los Angeles also researched and tried this approach, which they called controversy with civility.

The approach adheres to the following guidelines for “skilled disagreement”:

• Define the decision as a mutual problem, not as a win-lose situation.
• Be critical of ideas, not people (confirm others’ competence while disagreeing with their positions).
• Separate one’s personal worth from others’ reactions to one’s ideas.
• Differentiate before trying to integrate.
• Pay attention to others’ perspectives before refuting their ideas.
• Give everyone a fair hearing.
• Follow the canons of rational argument.

In support of the utility of explicitly engaging with differences, instead of avoiding or automatically refuting them, Smith quoted Alfred Sloan. As chair of General Motors, Sloan once concluded an executive meeting called to consider a major decision by saying, “I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here…. Then I propose we postpone further discussion until our next meeting to give ourselves some time to develop disagreements and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Smith called on the project team to expand its focus beyond outputs to a research and innovation approach to engineering education, in which research evidence leads to changes in both theory and

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²⁶Information about this NASA feature is available at www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/brainbites/nonflash/bb_home_vomitcomet.html.

practice. He showed a diagram neatly illustrating “the innovation cycle of educational practice and research,” in which educational practice identifies and motivates questions and ideas, which lead to educational research that results in answers and insights that in turn help improve educational practice.²⁷ His Collaboratory for Engineering Education Research has produced workshops to encourage such research and approaches, and Smith suggested that the CCEP project follow this model by including research in its activities to develop education.

In addition, the project team should address the challenge of how to change engineering faculty. One approach is to encourage them to think of themselves as designers rather than imparters of knowledge, an idea he credited to Jim Duderstadt at the University of Michigan. With respect to the project’s focus on producing pedagogical resources, he reiterated McKenna’s point that simply putting a resource on the web in hopes that people will use it does not work.

Effective Interventions (3): Inquiry-Based Projects

Suresh Dhaniyala, associate professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering at Clarkson University, described his development of a general engineering class at that university with funding from a NASA grant on Global Climate Change Education (the class was categorized under general engineering science rather than a specific engineering department to reduce administrative burdens associated with department regulations and paperwork). The class was offered in 2010 and 2011, but a lack of institutional support meant there was no provision for teaching assistance nor was the professor’s teaching load reduced to compensate for the addition. And because climate science is a quickly changing field, it requires more effort for engineering faculty to stay up to date on the topic. He combined his research with the class topic and thus mitigated the problem and benefited as a teacher.

In designing the course, Dhaniyala and his coteacher Sue Powers, Spence Professor of Sustainable Environmental Systems in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, wanted to make the class appealing to engineering students. To them this meant inquiry-based projects that were student-defined, guided by the professors, and discussed in class. They made the course quantitative to be more relevant to the students.

Students received NASA data on temperatures, precipitation, and other climate measures and were invited to draw their own conclusions. Then the teachers taught the climate science. (This approach—not starting with the climate science until students determined for themselves whether the climate was changing—was suggested by climate literacy experts they consulted.) Dhaniyala and Powers also engaged the students using the controversy with civility approach described by Karl Smith. The second part of the course called for the students to think about how to address climate change, framing it as a problem for which they could develop solutions. The goal was for students to learn that climate change is a subject that can be addressed through engineering and that there are career opportunities to do so.

Dhaniyala presented assessment data based on questions to the students before and after the course. The assessment measured knowledge, behavior, affect, and self-efficacy, and the results showed an increase in all measures after the class. Dhaniyala shared three questions and their results. In response to the first question, “What is the most important problem facing the United States today?,” 22 percent of the students identified climate change before the class versus 74 percent after. When asked “Is global warming caused mostly by human activities?,” 14.8 percent agreed before versus 82.6 percent after. In the students’ answers to the question, “Does climate change only impact future generations?,” 18.5 percent said yes before the class, compared to only 4.3 percent after.

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²⁷The diagram was from Leah H. Jamieson and Jack R. Lohmann. 2009. Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Engineering Educational Innovation. Washington: American Society for Engineering Education.

The experience revealed the following opportunities for similar efforts to teach climate science and policy to engineering students: team teaching, integration of research activities with teaching, and teaching an interdisciplinary set of students and bringing them together to solve problems.

Dhaniyala concluded with some lessons learned:

• Political/administrative considerations at universities need to be addressed.
• External funding was crucial in getting past organizational roadblocks—without it his work would have been much more difficult.
• Materials and syllabi for faculty would be helpful, and his project has plans to produce them.
• Climate science must be incorporated in the engineering curriculum, and would fit best as part of the fundamental engineering background taught to students so that they are aware of the issue when they learn about mitigation, adaptation, and engineered systems.

In the discussion following his presentation, Dhaniyala said that climate change education for engineers would be possible in a general earth sciences/climate change class rather than an engineering class, although an earth sciences course on climate change would provide more climate science background than engineering students might need (in his course only a few weeks of earth science knowledge had been necessary). Asked why female enrollment in the class was so high compared with the much lower percentage of women in engineering at the college (40 percent in the class, 18 percent in the college), Dhaniyala posited that it was a function of the higher number of women in environmental engineering and engineering management and that the class had preferentially attracted people from those areas.

Panel Discussion and Questions

Project team members Liz Cox of Red Rocks Community College, Jon Leydens and Junko Munakata Marr of the Colorado School of Mines, and Ed Berger of the University of Virginia joined the panelists for a discussion.

Aligning Pedagogy to Professional Goals

Berger began by asking the panelists their thoughts about aligning pedagogy with the goals of the profession, not just those of the classroom, observing that climate change education might serve the larger professional goals of increasing diversity and bringing in historically underrepresented students. McKenna thought that tying the project goals with the profession’s goals would improve the success of the project.

Smith commented that such alignment, which he referred to as “backward design” (i.e., starting with outcomes rather than pedagogy), might be applicable at the program or even university level now that regional accreditation is shifting to emphasize outcomes, but he warned about pushing pedagogical ideas and strategies too far. McKenna proposed that, instead of “pushing” results out, the project team figure out what the “pull” is for the profession and faculty to change.

Pedagogical Tensions

A question from the audience cited the tension between systems thinking as a pedagogical approach to climate change education and the more common approach in engineering education that is discipline-based and focused on problem solving without systems thinking. Several panelists commented that many faculty members might consider themselves to be systems thinkers, but their system is much smaller than

the system for climate change. Delborne suggested that the project might need to push engineering education to teach systems-level thinking through quantitative and qualitative ideas and methods. Berger cautioned that changing how disciplinary topics are taught could raise concerns about accreditation, which would dissuade faculty and programs from adopting the new pedagogies.

Leydens, shifting the conversation, asked the panelists to think about framing and mentioned the risk of linguistic landmines when using the term “climate change.” At his university faculty use “energy efficiency,” “energy conservation,” “energy use reduction,” and “sustainability” more often than “climate change.” Cox agreed—in her experience with business organizations working on sustainability practice, the terms “global warming” and “climate change” were emotional triggers. Delborne countered that if the team’s goal is to teach climate change to engineers, the term and its meaning must be explicitly introduced into engineers’ thinking. McKenna proposed that the team frame the topic as a challenge in need of a solution (instead of focusing on the scientific side of climate change), because engineering students tend to be problem solvers.

An audience member said the project should incorporate sociotechnical thinking in engineering education. In response McKenna noted that ABET Criterion H requires that engineering students be taught global, social, environmental, and economic context. Dhaniyala said his class had involved sociotechnical systems thinking by bringing in speakers to talk about policy issues, financial aspects, and social implications. Delborne asked Madsen how sociotechnical systems thinking fit into education at the tribal colleges, and whether they were better positioned to incorporate it. Madsen responded that tribal colleges want their students to think broadly and have knowledge beyond the field they want to pursue as a career, and that such a goal was compatible with sociotechnical systems thinking. Cox pointed out that community colleges are more limited in the changes they can make to curriculum because they have to ensure their classes can be accepted as transfer credit.

Research on Pedagogical Intervention

The final topic for discussion was the incorporation of research in the team’s approach to pedagogical intervention. Madsen observed that incorporating research in the pedagogy is very important for tribal colleges because it allows the faculty to be more involved and gives them the time to better develop the courses. Berger added that involving faculty in research opens new intellectual opportunities that are recognized and consistent with the reward process at their institutions. McKenna suggested that it might be better to frame research as scholarship, as the expectation of doing research in engineering education might be too much for engineering faculty.

Online Resources

At a lunchtime discussion during the second workshop, representatives from a number of online sites that feature materials relevant to the CCEP project described their contents:

• Online Ethics Center for Engineering and Research – onlineethics.org

An electronic repository of resources on science, engineering, and research ethics, for engineers, scientists, scholars, educators, students, and interested citizens.

• Ethics CORE – nationalethicscenter.org

An electronic library of resources on ethics in science and the responsible conduct of research; materials available for kindergarten through postgraduate study.

• Cleanet – cleanet.org

A collection of educational resources on climate change and energy topics; materials available for 6^th grade through college.

• Climate CoLab – climatecolab.org

A collaborative website that harnesses the collective intelligence of thousands of people from all around the world who submit and comment on proposals on how to address climate change.

The discussion indicated that the sites addressed the needs of different audiences, but that increased interaction would improve their ability to address those needs.

In Summary

Presentations and discussion acknowledged a number of challenges to integrating CC&ES education into education at various levels and into engineering curriculum. However a number of educational interventions that incorporated issues of sustainability, justice, public trust and engagement, and governance into the curriculum with CC&ES were identified and recommended. Some of the suggested interventions were used in formal education and the results were reported so that lessons could be learned for expanding the formal education efforts of the project.