Articulating and Challenging Sustainable Development in Undergraduate Engineering

Being able to structure reasoned argument is fundamental to engaging in critical discourse, student learning, and academic preparation. This paper analyzes students’ approaches to constructing ethical arguments about sustainability. In a required Engineering & Society course, students were asked to evaluate possible approaches as ethical or unethical. This work-in-progress paper focuses on students’ conceptual understanding of course material and their rhetorical decisions in structuring argument. Through analysis of student papers and interviews, we discovered that students’ reasoning abilities were limited by a range of factors from their struggle to overcome personal bias to a limited understanding of sustainability. However, students also experimented with rhetorical strategies. We describe implications, including the need to improve our teaching both of ethical argumentation, and of the potentialities and pitfalls of sustainable development and alternatives.