Prototyping Social and Environmental Impact in Engineering Courses
The world needs engineers who, in addition to their technical skills, can evaluate and address the environmental, social, and ethical factors impacting their engineering decisions. In parallel, engineering faculty need pathways to rapidly adjust their teaching strategies to meet these needs in both their individual courses and across the engineering curriculum, since broad curricular changes can often move slowly or not at all. Students in this project will address these needs by designing, implementing, and assessing a Systems Thinking Framework that undergraduate engineers can apply to coursework, projects, and professional practice. Systems Thinking considers a concept not as a discrete idea but as housed within a broader system, with dynamic and interconnected relationships between system components. Systems Thinking is inherently a sociotechnical approach to problem solving and can promote examining environmental, social, and ethical relationships.
We aim to deploy this Systems Thinking Framework in Modules across Mudd’s engineering courses (E82, E83, E84, E85, E86, E101, E102) and in Clinic. These Modules will provide consistent practice for students to evaluate the environmental and sociotechnical aspects of engineering design on real-world case studies rooted in the technical expertise of each field. Potential examples of Module topics include Renewable energy integrated power grid modeling for E84 or Wind turbine and wind farm design for E83. To incorporate the Systems Thinking Framework, students in this project will assist with deploying and evaluating a prototyping process for faculty enacting large-scale curricular change.
This is a multi-year NSF-funded project led by Profs. Bahena, Fowler, and Mendelson and also collaborating with Profs. Hawkins and Helmns. The student hired for this role will help us (1) develop Mudd’s Systems Thinking Framework (set of lenses to apply and questions to ask), (2) identify topics, resources, and content for Modules using the Framework, and (3) develop prototypes alongside faculty to deploy the Systems Thinking Framework in HMC engineering courses.
You can be a part of creating widespread and lasting impact at HMC and for engineering education - equipping your peers to incorporate environmental, social, and ethical components in their engineering endeavors. You will also collaborate closely with multiple Engineering and Climate faculty to learn about course design and engineering education research. As the first student hire on the project, you will be essential in helping us build an equitable and collaborative interdisciplinary research team for the next 3 years of this project.
To apply, please write ~1-2 paragraphs to answer these questions to help us learn if you'll be a good fit: Why are you interested in working on this project? What will you bring to the project and what do you hope to learn? Which of the Engineering courses (E82, E83, E84, E85, E86, E101, E102) would you feel able to and/or excited to contribute to for Module development? Please also submit the names of two HMC professors as references who can comment on your work habits.