Teaching sustainability to first year civil engineering students

The role of, and need for, universities to create and promote a holistic approach to engineering is a key part of developing sustainability literacy among future engineers. This paper reports on three different, but linked, exercises that teach undergraduates the complexity of sustainability in civil engineering. In the first exercise, students prepared a written commentary on an exploration of their campus locale to identify typical civil engineering issues such as construction trends over time and set these against economic and social demands and impacts at a city scale. The second exercise asked students to rank the importance of components of sustainable communities as a civil engineer, and then rank them separately as a citizen. In the third exercise, ten groups of approximately ten students were led through a discussion around a holistic approach to engineering and the impact of civil engineering infrastructure development. These exercises provide students with an understanding of hard-to-measure boundary conditions, more informally ‘context’, which can surround the technical excellence at the heart of civil engineering systems. The paper reports student feedback and discusses implications for teaching sustainability. The exercises and experiences presented in this paper can be utilised by other civil engineering degree providers.