(121c) Community Based Learning in Sustainability Engineering Education

Introduction: Industrial ecology and sustainability education have evolved over time, as this relatively new discipline has emerged and has been refined. Courses engaging with these topics are often found in engineering departments, and feature project or problem-based learning (PBL) commonly with an industrial partner. This provides students the opportunity to apply the topics that they have learned in class in a real-world situation, complete with the constraints and uncertainties inherent in practice. Community-based learning (CBL), a combination of service learning and PBL, allows students to not only apply the material from a sustainability course, but also to do so in service of a community partner. This work presents an analysis of a multi-year effort in teaching a CBL course on the topic of industrial ecology and sustainability in a North American context.

Although often IE and LCA courses and curriculum are centered around industry partnerships, there is also the potential to focus them using a CBL or service-learning structure. Problem and PBL have been utilized to teach IE and LCA, typically with industrial partners, in the context of “learning by doing”, where students complete a project with uncertainties and unknowns for an industrial partner. Potential exists to combine these two types of “learning through doing,” to provide students with the opportunity to learn about IE and LCA through engaging with a community partner. Utilizing Brundiers et al. (2010)’s definitions of PBL and service-learning, the author would posit that CBL is a combination of the two, retaining the characteristics of PBL in the collaboration with partners, co-production of knowledge, supervision by a faculty and stakeholder, and systemic innovation with service to the community, with also the characteristics of service learning such as educating people and working in support of societal change. CBL courses often connect students with a partnering community organization, where the students’ learning experience is enriched through working with the partner, and the students’ work serves the partner in some fashion. CBL has been defined by the Morgridge Center for Public Service at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as “a credit-bearing educational experience that integrates meaningful community service with guided reflection to enhance students’ understanding of course content as well as their sense of civic responsibility”. Although these courses are commonly considered outside the purview of an engineering (and IE) education, there is a significant and often untapped potential for students to enrich their knowledge of IE through working with and in service to a community partner, and the potential for co-creation of knowledge with that partner.

The notion of combining PBL and service-learning courses is not new, although the CBL terminology may be with respect to engineering education. The field of chemistry provides ample examples of this occurring in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education. Draper (2004) describes the coupled “project-based service-learning” integration in an advanced environmental chemistry course, and a statistically significant increase in the average score of student responses to end of semester evaluations compared to previous conventional offerings, suggesting that students may enjoy the ability to serve the community while learning, and the potential for it to give greater meaning to their efforts.

Methods: Each semester students work in teams (ideally in groups of three to four students, although this has changed over the iterative offerings of the course) to evaluate the environmental, economic, and societal considerations of a product or process identified by their community partner as a critical issue for which assistance is desired. The teams utilize tools such as LCA, material flow analysis, economic valuation, and societal considerations, that had been introduced and explored during the course. They are tasked with providing a recommendation to the partner based on the analyses performed. These tools and concepts are explored during the course in a typical lecture format with weekly assessments.

The project partners are typically procured as part of the UniverCITY year program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where each year the university partners with a new public partner (for a 3-year duration), who submit project proposals that they would like to collaborate on. Some of the particular projects completed over the years have been described previously in prior publications. The partners over the years have largely been different, including both urban and rural counties in the State of Wisconsin, such as Dane, Brown, Pepin, and Green County. As projects are identified by and defined with the partner, they have varied each year, although they have included phosphorus control at small-scale wastewater treatment plants, sustainable low-income housing materials, solar panels and wind turbines at a small school district, manure management from dairy cattle, and recovering blue-green algae from waterways to be used for a beneficial product. In general, the community partners have an interest in sustainability, but often lack the resources to conduct a quantitative assessment of the sustainability of a planned project or product acquisition.

Results: Qualitative data has been collected as the student experience in the course, and the “role of CBL in sustainability education.” The reflections are aggregated into a word cloud. Two brief responses warrant paraphrased mention based on this reflection, first that it goes beyond idealized coursework problems which illustrates the PBL-based aspect of the project, and second, sustainability is ultimately a community project, because it involves a range of players, from individuals to the world, each making choices to reduce their impacts. A single person will have a pretty limited impact, but communities can change the world. And you need to have a true partnership with the communities you are working with, in order to actually make real change. This highlights the student's belief that sustainability is really a cooperative project. In general, students had a positive experience in the course and with its CBL aspect. The figure presents a word cloud of all of the reflections from the 2018 course offering. The words presented in the largest font were mentioned the most often in the student reflections, which include: sustainability, community, learning, and students. This brief reflection, employed during the 2018 course offering, is relatively simple to analyze, based on utilizing the frequency of words in the responses. It was applied to relatively short responses and represents one opportunity for student reflection. The major issue with this technique is that it only analyzes the frequency of words or short phrases, and not the context in which they are used, which would allow for the identification of themes within the responses themselves.

Emergent themes are identified through the usage of content analysis for the guided reflections from the 2020 offering of the course. Particular themes were identified in the majority of the responses, with the most common being that CBL provided a genuine context for learning about sustainability. Eighty eight percent of the students described this, and in particular, as a way to make sustainability real to them and to clarify their learning on somewhat abstract topics. The second most commonly identified theme was the notion that the CBL component of the course provided a deeper understanding of the material taught in the course (67%). Several students described that they worked diligently on this project because it would go to a real community partner, and was not only for a grade. Two intertwined themes which were commonly identified in the student reflections was the idea that working with a real community illustrated the complexities and tradeoffs inherent with sustainability work, and a related theme of the barriers inherent in completing this type of work, identified by 58% and 47% of the students, respectively. Other themes emerged, but were largely in the minority, such as sustainability as paramount to well-being, that sustainability is inherently a community endeavor, and relating sustainability to the circular economy. Based on the prevalence of the themes presented in the students’ reflections, is it reasonable to conclude they in general found the inclusion of a CBL component in the sustainability engineering course to be beneficial to their learning.

Conclusions: IE is the “science of sustainability” and its application. Incorporating a CBL element into an IE course over several offerings has provided a positive experience for the students in the course, while providing them an opportunity to experience sustainability in action. The level of knowledge gained by the students is comparable to the first PBL offering of the course, and across the multiple years of offerings. Operationally, providing an experience like this for students is not all that different from the PBL methods which are commonly utilized in engineering courses, to teach topics such as IE and LCA, although CBL is more time and resource intensive. This combination of methods allows for IE education to be extending from working with industrial partners to improving the communities which the students live and work in. Multiple methods of assessment of learning ranging from the knowledge survey to the analysis of guided reflection are presented along with the tradeoffs comparing ease of use with insight generated.