Integrating Environmental Justice into Civil and Environmental Engineering Curricula

Abstract It is well established that communities of color experience disproportionate exposure to environmental contaminants producing negative health outcomes and undue environmental justice challenges. Many of the exposures and infrastructure inequalities are legacies of residential racial segregation, such as redlining and underbounding. While the environmental justice movement has made great strides in incorporating public health research into these issues, there has been less effort focused on integrating environmental engineering training into the movement. This paper describes research on developing and implementing a suite of integrated, interdisciplinary, community-engaged, anti-racism training opportunities for civil and environmental engineering undergraduates to build capacity for addressing environmental justice challenges. For this project, we integrate environmental engineering, applied anthropology, and Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education to redesign existing civil and environmental engineering courses to include equitable development within a particular community. The redesigned curriculum provides broader educational training to address environmental engineering challenges, meet community identified needs, and considers the impacts of structural racism. Our initial focus is within a historic urban Black community in the southeast, where our work explores urban infrastructure, stormwater, brownfields, food security, and job creation among other issues. The project is also studying the impacts of the new curriculum on student perceptions of racism and justice and on faculty interest and capacity for catalyzing additional curricular and co-curricular change. Initial collaborations from the community-based research have included diverse communication tools to share information with and about the community.