Based on a perceived need within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Utah to increase faculty and student awareness of 1) the national infrastructure crisis and 2) a departmental-wide pedagogical approach to engineering instruction with a more holistic, global understanding of infrastructure systems, three faculty members attended the 2nd Annual Infrastructure Education Workshop on Pedagogies of Engagement in Infrastructure Classrooms. Hosted by the Center for Infrastructure Transformation and Education (CIT-E), over 30 national faculty members participated in a three-day, best-practices teaching seminar and workshop held on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah (May 2015). One of the primary goals of this and subsequent workshops is to grow a community of practice focused on creating learning modules to populate an open-source teaching and research database on infrastructure education.
This paper discusses our use of the workshop materials including modifications made to them to fit our local environment. The paper describes additional activities inspired by and/or designed to complement the workshop materials. Crucial questions for our project team included: What does infrastructure education mean and how does it differ from civil engineering education? How do we teach it? And, how do we assess student achievement within it? The work reported here is, in essence, a pilot study of initial efforts to answer these questions. In this process, we both broadened and deepened our understanding of what the infrastructure perspective means and how it informs the delivery and assessment of a baccalaureate program. Part of our assessment of this pilot study includes descriptions and analyses of student deliverables by both direct and indirect methods.
Dr. Schmucker has 20 years experience in teaching and consulting. Focused on high quality teaching following the T4E, ExCEEd, and NETI teaching models, he currently is a full-time teaching professional with a focus on practice, project, and problem-based teaching methodologies.
Dr. Joshua Lenart is an Associate Instructor with the Communication, Leadership, Ethics, and Research (CLEAR) Program at the University of Utah where he teaches technical communications for the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Department of Chemical Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah in Rhetoric and Writing Studies and an M.A. in English from Montana State University. His research focuses on land management policy in two discrete areas. The first relates to civil infrastructure projects and landscape-scale impacts on habitat, community resilience, and long-term land use planning; the second involves the utilization, conservation, and management of big game wildlife resources.
For the past five years he has led various transdisciplinary teaching and research projects examining land and wildlife resource management conflicts vis-à-vis public policy, assessing stakeholder needs and desires, resource analysis, and collective impact engagement. Currently, he is working closely with several local and national organizations to research and rally opposition against the transfer of federal public lands to state governance.
Dr. Steve Burian is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Utah. He served as the first co-Director of Sustainability Curriculum Development, and is currently the Project Director of the USAID-funded U.S.-Pakistan Center f
Amir is a research associate and an instructor in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Utah. Amir receives a Bachelor's of Science in Civil Engineering from Shiraz University in Iran, a Master's in Environmental Engineering from University of Toledo, and a Doctorate in Environmental Engineering from University of Utah.
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