Strengthening our wings of equity to help civil engineering students navigate and soar in our challenging world: successes and lessons from a bottom-up curriculum initiative in Canada

The fundamental competencies of an effective civil engineer can be represented by the metaphor of a bird’s wings. One wing embodies technically-centered competencies, while the other embodies equity-centered competencies. This bird, representing an engineer working in water resources and other civil engineering contexts, needs both wings to fly.

Traditional civil engineering education in Canada, and we suspect elsewhere, has asymmetrically developed and prioritized technically-centered competencies over equity-centered ones. This pedagogical miscalibration undermines the ability of future engineers to fulfill their fundamental responsibility to work in the interest of the public good, which includes the safeguarding of human life, welfare, and the environment. The implications of this miscalibration are evident in the history of civil engineering, which is filled with technically excellent and often well-intentioned designs that have contributed to unjust, unsustainable, and racist outcomes.

To respond to this need to elevate equity-centred competencies as foundational in the training of civil engineers, we undertook a bottom-up, program-wide initiative with the goal of systematically embedding equity-centred competencies, goals, and knowledge systems across the undergraduate civil engineering program at the University of Victoria (Canada). This initiative integrated and sequenced modules on environmental justice, sustainability science, anti-racism, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), linked through the unifying principle of “equity”. Yet, we recognize the potential limitation that linking these efforts may flatten important differences across these distinct intellectual traditions (sustainability, environmental justice, EDI).

Through initial successes in 3rd and 4th year water resource and groundwater hydrology courses, this initiative expanded by iteratively consulting with interested departmental faculty members and through voluntary curriculum development supported by an initiative-dedicated teaching assistant. In total, 23 lecture slide decks and 8 in-class activities were developed and are now embedded within multiple core courses, ensuring every student in our program is now directly exposed to these concepts. We have made all resources openly available on our ‘Learn and Teach Green, People-Centered Civil Engineering’ initiative website (https://oac.uvic.ca/civelearningandteaching/).

Our goal in describing this initiative is to inspire or enable similar initiatives by documenting our motivations, conceptual framings, curriculum development process and outcomes, and reflections on lessons learned through this process.