Sustainability and Critical Thinking in Civil Engineering Curriculum

Abstract

This paper describes a method for presenting concepts of sustainable development to first-year civil engineering students using pedagogical techniques related to critical thinking development. Sustainable development is an emerging area of environmental management that is important to civil engineering students. The concept can be associated with most design-related projects. In addition, the development of students' abilities to think critically about engineering problems and design projects is an important educational objective. Explicit methods for developing students' critical thinking skills have been adapted for the first-year civil engineering curriculum. The development of critical thinking skills is combined with the coverage of sustainable development concepts in this approach. This combination was chosen because the issue of sustainable development exhibits many of the characteristics of ill-structured problems that require critical thinking. Therefore, the combination of critical thinking pedagogy and sustainable development concepts provides an important contribution to the future education of civil engineering students.