Today's environmental challenges, such as access to clean water and energy, climate change, and treatment of pollution and waste, have an acute sense of urgency. There is broad recognition that solutions to these complex challenges will require environmental engineers to integrate concepts from engineering as well as the natural and physical sciences, social sciences, business, and communications to address the pressing challenges facing society at the individual, community, national, and global levels across many sectors of the economy. The existing environmental engineering undergraduate curriculum common today in the US fails to provide graduates with sufficient real-world skills to meet these modern environmental challenges. The Department of Civil Engineering in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering at Montana State University (MSU) proposes to transform environmental engineering education by replacing current topic-focused course model with a four-year thematic thread curriculum that integrates technical, social, and economic competencies and provides students with repeated opportunities to address ill-defined, complex problems like those they will face as professionals. The project is aligned with the NSF's Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) program mission to catalyze revolutionary approaches to engineering education. As an Adaptation and Implementation (A&I) project, it builds off evidence-based organizational change strategies employed at other institutions, applies ground-breaking pedagogical methods in the project's local context, and propagates the transformation of engineering education.

This project will develop an environmental engineering program around thematic threads of technical, social, and economic knowledge while developing a culture that rewards the use of best pedagogical practices for continuous professional formation throughout the undergraduate program. Faculty will facilitate the transfer of knowledge from basic math, science, and humanities courses into the integrated project-based curriculum using a variety of proven, high-impact education practices and pedagogies, such as inquiry- and project-based learning. First, faculty will apply a collaborative process to replace approximately 32 credits of topic-focused environmental engineering coursework, which would have been taken primarily in the final two years of the undergraduate program, with 32 credits of integrated courses distributed across the curriculum starting in the freshman year. These new courses will serve as the mechanism to integrate the concepts covered in the remaining topic-focused courses that still comprise most of the undergraduate curriculum. Second, faculty will develop appropriate problem-based learning activities for each year of the curriculum to provide students with practice solving a variety of open-ended and complex problems and gain experience in communication and teamwork. Each project will build the knowledge and values necessary to allow for continuous professional development. Finally, faculty will develop systems and procedures that institutionalize faculty coordination, knowledge sharing, and training in best teaching practices. Through this approach, the student experience will be transformed to one that develops an early, strong, and authentic engineering identity and provides the context and practice necessary for effective and continued independent learning. Improved student retention, diversity, and professional competencies will result. This project will furthermore provide a curriculum map for other environmental engineering programs that includes discipline-specific threads within integrated courses, assessment plans, and strategies for implementing collaborative teaching methods.