(577c) Preparing Future Engineers to Tackle Global Challenges: Fostering Global Awareness and Social Responsibility through Capstone Design Course

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and global issues continue to arise, it is crucial to have engineering students understand the complexities of solving real world global challenges as they will be the ones innovating solutions for the future. There is a need to understand how to better provide students with learning experiences that provide them opportunities to analyze and evaluate engineering concepts to a design solution as well as the environmental, social, cultural, and economic ramifications of their proposed solutions. Translating these types of learning outcomes to the classroom is important as educators to give the students authentic experiences and projects to facilitate this cross-cultural learning and informing students of the global context to large societal issues and fostering social responsibility and awareness. This is especially true in the capstone design course, which is the cumulation of the undergraduates’ engineering experience. This team design project relies on student’s connecting their experiences, curriculum knowledge, and skills to design a safe, efficient, and feasible process. Specifically, in chemical engineering their capstone projects focus on process and plant design, which can have environmental, social, and economic issues that can affect the project design and decision making. There is a need to understand and foster student decision making surrounding social responsibility and global awareness in their project designs using established theoretical models and frameworks. The OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) global competence framework and questionnaire was used as a framework to assess how students perceived these global and societal issues in their projects. The PISA framework has four pillars: 1. the capacity to examine issues and situations of local, global, and cultural significance; 2. the capacity to understand and appreciate different perspectives and worldviews; 3. the ability to engage in open, appropriate, and effective interactions across cultures; and 4. the capacity to take action toward sustainable development and collective well-being.[1] The students were given the voluntary questionnaire before and after the capstone design course which included the PISA global competence questions as well as information on demographics, languages spoken, and personal cultural influences.

This talk will discuss how the four pillars of global competency were implemented in the senior capstone design course at two universities. It will address best practice topics such as lectures that help students understand how to implement sustainable and safety practices to ensure responsible process design, project topics and selection, location selection, and social, cultural and economic decision making for location. The impacts of these best practices on students’ awareness of global and societal issues will be discussed with the lens of PISA framework.

1. OECD (2019), "PISA 2018 Global Competence Framework", in PISA 2018 Assessment and Analytical Framework, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/043fc3b0-en.