Catch them early! — Embedding sustainability in Year 1 design projects
Growing up in a period of climate crisis and a post-pandemic economic slowdown, students entering University resonate strongly with the concept of sustainability. Within the higher education space, we must strive to harness this potential from early on in the degree programme to develop competent and responsible global citizens. Design projects in Year 1 that interlace technical competence with global sustainability challenges is one such endeavour.
Across all disciplines, not least the engineering profession, there is a growing emphasis on the dual objective of maximizing socio-economic value, whilst minimising environmental impact. While core technical concepts in our respective disciplines remain largely the same, their applicability and context have evolved significantly.
As educators, we must foster in our students the ability of leveraging core technical expertise to address current and future global sustainability challenges.
Consequently, as educators, we must foster in our students the ability to leverage core technical expertise to address current and future global sustainability challenges. Such learning experiences help students work up the ladder of information, from insight to impact. And at Leeds, we need not look beyond the vision statement of our Student Education Strategy to acknowledge the importance we attach to our students having a positive impact on the world.
Expanding Horizons
Conscious of the evolving landscape, we at the School of Chemical and Process Engineering (SCaPE) have started design projects in Year 1 that have strong sustainability undercurrents. The challenges in economic, social and environmental sustainability have significantly expanded the horizons of the chemical engineering discipline. We decided to offer design project topics that demonstrated this ‘breadth’ to our student community. This is particularly useful to do in Year 1 as the curriculum naturally trains students for ‘depth’ as they progress through the programme.
Some of the design projects now offered in Year 1 include PET plastic bottle-to-bottle recycling, green ammonia manufacture, aspirin production, desalination, biodiesel and paint manufacturing. The diversity of these projects is further illustrated through their mapping onto several different United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs).
Wanting to provide students with a sense of ownership, we asked them to submit their preferred project topics and reasoning for their choices. A strong appetite for sustainability was evident in their responses. While there was a good spread of interest across the different options, most choices were motivated by climate action, net-zero and sustainability. Even more fascinatingly, several groups’ responses mapped their preferred project topics onto the UNSDGs, without being explicitly asked to do so. Students could have motivated their choices in any way, but a majority gravitated towards the sustainability theme.
Surfacing Skills and Learning Outcomes
In the context of these findings, the onus to link core technical concepts to sustainability issues was squarely on us as educators. At SCaPE, students are conventionally taught fundamental concepts of process engineering in Year 1; the idea of these design projects was to enable students to apply these concepts to a process they feel passionate about.
Year 1 design projects can be overwhelming for students. Hence, regular consultancy sessions were scheduled at regular intervals throughout the project period for students to get feedback on their progress. Such sessions also provide a more personalised learning environment that is often missing in Year 1 programmes with sizeable student cohorts.
The intended learning outcomes of the design projects also incorporate the ongoing University-wide Surfacing Skills project. Design projects typically start with students engaging in a process optioneering exercise, where they identify the process objective and constraints to take appropriate decisions. This builds student competence in ‘information searching’ and ‘critical thinking’. Subsequently analysing the effectiveness of a design, including its life cycle environmental impacts, activates ‘systems thinking’ and ‘integrated problem solving’ skills. Within the project, aspects of peer challenge and mutual dependency improve ‘collaboration’ and ‘communication’ skills. By virtue of engaging students across these diverse sustainability skills, the design project serves as an authentic and well-rounded learning experience, in which students can articulate the skills they acquired.
Considering AI
Going forward, with the growing impact of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, we aim to use these design projects as a medium for students to explore the strengths and limitations of AI approaches. One of the key features of a design project is its open-ended nature. The growing accessibility of AI will potentially trigger a paradigm shift in terms of how information is collated to start a project. However, developing design solutions for sustainability challenges from collated information requires a degree of creative synthesis that AI might not be adept at performing (at least not yet!). As Dr. Li Jiang, Director of Stanford AIRE (AI, Robotics and Education), highlights, AI cannot do a good job on going from zero to one i.e. the innovation part of a task.
Equipping the Next Generation of Responsible Global Citizens
In conclusion, embedding sustainability in Year 1 design projects is critical in nurturing the next generation of responsible global citizens. By providing students with a sense of ownership in a learning environment with appropriate scaffolding, we can equip them to confront the global challenges of today and tomorrow. Together, we can create a more sustainable and equitable future for all.
Dr Manoj Ravi (Curriculum Redefined Lecturer, School of Chemical and Process Engineering)
