Today I’ve witnessed the power of bringing different disciplines to the classroom, especially bridging engineering and social sciences to explore eye-opening perspectives. I had the pleasure of hosting Jay Turner as a guest lecturer in my environmental life cycle assessment class for engineers. Jay is an environmental historian who writes on policy and environmental politics related to climate change and the clean energy transition.
Our Drexel Engineering students were surprised to learn about the geopolitical aspects of the extraction and manufacturing of materials, and how the US depends on many other countries to produce basic goods. They also learned about the impact of policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act in material extraction, production, and recycling, and about the numerous tradeoffs to consider between social, political, and environmental aspects of their decisions.
One student wrote: “in engineering practices, it is incredibly important to understand how our decisions, even down to the materials we use, have an impact. It is not just as simple as design and construction, since we need to consider how the decisions we are making will have an impact on the people that are living in the communities that projects are taking place”.
We discussed the role of engineers in the clean energy transition, and how we cannot recycle our way out of the material shortages we will face in the future. It was a rich experience, and I urge engineering professors to try and bring social scientists to expose the students to different viewpoints around the same subjects they’re used to explore in a more quantitative and objective way.
Check out Jay’s newest book here: https://lnkd.in/dtX6Wzws