Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Journal Title
Sustainability
Volume Number
12
Issue Number
21
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219145
Version
Publisher PDF: the final published version of the article, with professional formatting and typesetting
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a CC BY License.
Disciplines
Engineering
Abstract
What do engineering students in 2020 need to know about energy to be successful in the workplace and contribute to addressing society’s issues related to energy? Beginning with this question, we have designed a new course for second-year engineering students. Drawing on the interdisciplinary backgrounds of our diverse team of engineering instructors, we aimed to provide an introduction to energy for all engineering students that challenged the dominant discourse in engineering by valuing students’ lived experiences and bringing in examples situated in different cultural contexts. An Integrated Approach to Energy was offered for the first time in Spring 2020 for 18 students. In this paper, we describe the design of the course including learning objectives, content, and pedagogical approach. We assessed students’ learning using exams and the impact of the overall course using interviews. Students demonstrated achievement of the learning objectives in technical areas. In addition, interviews revealed that they learned about environmental, economic, and social aspects of engineering practice. We intend for this course to serve as a model of engineering as a sociotechnical endeavor by challenging students with scenarios that are technically demanding and require critical thinking about contextual implications.
Digital USD Citation
Hoople, Gordon D.; Chen, Diana A.; Lord, Susan M.; Gelles, Laura A.; Bilow, Felicity; and Mejia, Joel Alejandro, "An Integrated Approach to Energy Education in Engineering" (2020). School of Engineering: Faculty Scholarship. 56.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/engineering_facpub/56