An integrated food-energy-water systems course that builds systems thinking skills among graduate students in STEM

Current and future global challenges present complex, interrelated problems.Some of these global issues are related to the Food, Energy and Water (FEW) nexus.To address these global challenges and for the United States' economic and technological competitiveness, there is a need for systems thinkers.This paper will detail the graduate-level, one-credit interdisciplinary Integrated Systems course structure that may become a framework for teaching systems thinking at the graduate level and for the development of systems thinkers in STEM disciplines.The NRT Integrated FEW Systems course is part of the Rural Resource Resiliency NSF Research Traineeship (the NRT) at Kansas State University.The NRT prepares master's and doctoral students from STEM disciplines to solve the grand challenges of creating a more resilient food, energy, and water systems in semi-arid regions.Systems thinking framework provides concepts and tools to understand complex problems that link society, economy, and the environment at multiple scales.The NRT Integrated FEW Systems course is a cross-listed course that has been taught annually in the fall semester by faculty from the College of Engineering, the College of Agriculture, and the College of Arts and Sciences since 2019.This course is an introduction to systems thinking, with specific application to the FEW nexus.The course explores the natural-environmental systems, the human-social systems, and their interactions.This paper will discuss course format, content team teaching strategies, grading structures, and evaluation.The course lectures combine theory and practice, and design to establish knowledge base in system thinking concepts and tools.Course grading includes reflections and analyses, system component maps, and a final project, an integrated system map.The evaluation results through the four (4) cohorts show that student ratings about their perceived ability to perform FEW systems tasks improved from the beginning to the end of the course, from 'somewhat able' to 'very able.' Students rated most course activities as "very useful".