“Engaging with Community-based Learning Experiences to Improve Sustainability Education,” Associate Professor Andrea Hicks, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Professor Hicks is active in advancing teaching practices that involve community-based learning to improve sustainability education. Community-based learning is a strategy that integrates a community-based activity, usually a project, with classroom instruction. She published “The role of community-based learning in teaching about industrial ecology and sustainability in the context of engineering education: A case study from the field” (2021, Hicks) a paper based on her CEE421 “Environmental Sustainability Engineering” course. During the last two offerings of CEE494 “Civil and Environmental Engineering Decision Making” which evolves around engineering disasters, ethical engineering decision making, and how we teach these concepts and content, she has collected guided reflections from students and will use social science research methods to draw insights into effective pedagogical strategies. These strategies will be implemented in her course, the learning outcomes assessed and if found to have a significant impact on student learning, the approach will be disseminated to other engineering faculty.