Teaching the Socially-Situated Nature of Climate Change Science in Technical STEM Courses: A Hurricane Katrina Case Study

To address climate change, social issues need to be integrated in geoscience-related STEM research and curriculum. However, social issues are often ignored in STEM fields, even though STEM practices are usually implicitly rooted in inequitable values and practices. A previous study showed that some students do not see the relevance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities when they are presented as separate from technical content, and some students argued that social content was irrelevant or inappropriate in a technical STEM course. Some engineering faculty have identified the lack of curriculum as a barrier to integrating the socially embedded nature of STEM into their introductory courses. Therefore, we developed a case that addresses social issues such as race, class, and gender in relationship to the social and environmental characteristics of New Orleans and its built environment. The case shows how marginalized people, who have been historically and systemic discriminated against, suffered the greatest losses under the impacts of climate-change driven Hurricane Katrina. The case uses student-centered learning strategies, is applicable for use in a range of courses, including many geoscience courses, and will be publicly available. In Fall 2019 the case will be taught in two first year undergraduate civil and environmental engineering courses (n ≈120) at a R1 university. Coursework from the case will be analyzed using Qualitative Content Analysis, which distills responses into categories and themes that characterize both commonalities and differences. While we do not yet have results, results will be presented at AGU. Our results will provide insight into the effectiveness of our case study as an intervention as well as challenges and successes in implementation, which may help others implement this or other similar activities. More broadly, our intervention demonstrates one way of integrating content more commonly found in interdisciplinary courses into technical, disciplinary-focuses courses. Our study will provide insight into how students respond when DEI and technical content are interconnected, helping further our ability to prepare students in a range of geoscience-related courses to respond to the challenges of climate change through an equity and justice-oriented lens.