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Main Menu Session 2613

Chemical Engineering and Society—A Response to Constituency Concerns

Ronald E. Terry, W. Vincent Wilding Chemical Engineering Brigham Young University

Abstract — As members of the faculty of the Chemical Engineering Department at Brigham Young University (BYU), we have used feedback from constituency groups to assist in the design of a new course called Chemical Engineering and Society. These constituency groups consisted of students, alumni, our own faculty, members of faculty of other engineering programs, employers of companies that hire our students, an external advisory board, and a student advisory board. The new course treats three topics that are fundamental to responsible engineering practice. These are ethics, the environment, and safety. Course objectives include the following: 1. To understand and commit to sound ethical behavior; 2. To understand, commit to, and gain experience in environmentally responsible engineering; 3. To understand, commit to, and gain experience in engineering safety. The material in the new course lays a foundation for design problems interspersed throughout later courses in the chemical engineering curriculum.

The purposes of this paper are: 1) to demonstrate the interaction and contributions of our constituency groups in the development of our educational plan to respond to EC2000; and 2) to describe the new course and its educational goals and benefits for our chemical engineering students.

Introduction

During the development of an educational plan for students in the Chemical Engineering Department at Brigham Young University, we, along with our faculty colleagues, identified several topics that we felt were being treated insufficiently in our curriculum.1-2 Many of these were listed in ABET’s Engineering Criterea 2000 as desirable student outcomes. These included engineering ethics, industrial and laboratory safety issues, environmental concerns, leadership and teaming principles, and other issues involving how chemical engineering relates to technology and society. We wrote a series of educational goals, attributes, and competencies for the general topics of ethics and professionalism, environment, and safety that we proposed to be included in the undergraduate curriculum. We then asked for feedback from our constituencies including our colleagues and an external advisory board regarding these proposed changes to the curriculum. The external advisory board consisting of one academic person and 4 industrial representatives reviewed our proposal and made some excellent suggestions and even volunteered material for use in teaching these concepts including specific topics in safety and

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ® 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Terry, R., & Wilding, W. V. (2002, June), Chemical Engineering And Society A Response To Constituency Concerns Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10632