Workshop: Frontiers in Environmental Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

0618005 Kilduff The field of environmental engineering developed from its roots in civil engineering and its sub-discipline sanitary engineering as the era of concern about the large-scale effects of human activity on environmental quality began in the 1960s. Environmental engineering thus always has had a focus on civil infrastructure and public health engineering--specifically on techniques to provide safe drinking water and treat municipal wastewater. Expansion of sanitary engineering into the field of environmental engineering involved three major paradigm shifts. First, the focus of concern expanded beyond directly protecting humans from the effects of water pollution to also protecting/remediating water in the natural environment (aquatic ecosystems). Second, the effects of pollutants on other environmental media--air and land resources--and control of pollutant emissions to those media were added to the long-standing focus on water quality engineering. Third, a recognition of the complexity of physical, chemical, and biological processes that affect pollutant behavior in the environment--and the need to understand those processes to design appropriate engineering solutions--led to a strong emphasis on science in the developing field of environmental engineering. As such, the field developed with a strongly interdisciplinary flavor and strong links to many fields of science as well as to several major fields of engineering. Over the past 50 years, the field's focus on solving pollution problems by "end-of-pip" solutions gradually expanded to include concepts of source control, pollution prevention, and industrial ecology. Researchers in environmental engineering also have been quick to adapt cutting-edge technical developments in other fields of engineering and the basic sciences such that research in the field today bears scant relation to the practice of past decades. Nonetheless, environmental engineers are concerned that undergraduate and graduate curricula of environmental engineering programs in American universities have not changed sufficiently to reflect these developments. In addition, there are concerns about the widely varying content and breadth of programs called environmental engineering. Consequently, a group of environmental engineering faculty, led by the principal investigator, concluded that it was timely to critically examine the curriculum content and educational goals of environmental engineering programs at U.S. universities as the basis for developing a "core body of knowledge" In turn, this could lead to a core curriculum for environmental engineering programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels. In cooperation with the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, a planning committee will organize and conduct a workshop to examine these and related issues. The workshop tentatively is scheduled for early January 2007. It also will assess new curricular and educational opportunities in the context of ABET requirements, and developments in other relevant fields, such as biotechnology, nano-science and technology, and cyberinfrastructure.