
doi: 10.18260/1-2--41121
Engineering and Data Science for Environmental Justice (Resource Exchange) This resource exchange will explore the intersection of engineering education, spatial data, and environmental justice. Environmental injustices have disproportionately adversely impacted the health of Communities of Color for generations. For example, race is the most powerful variable in predicting where waste facilities are sited (United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1987), and pollutants “disproportionately and systematically” harm Black and Latinx people who live by highways, which were historically purposefully placed through low-income communities (Tessum et al., 2021). Integrated engineering and data science practices are powerful tools for identifying and redressing environmental injustices, but few curricula have been published that highlight how to teach these topics in high schools. In this curriculum exchange paper, we will share an instructional approach for teaching environmental justice. This instructional approach was implemented in high school engineering classrooms (comprised mostly of 9th and 10th graders) as part of a trimester-long engineering design course. Specifically, this resource exchange will highlight activities that used four case studies (e.g., location and effects of interstate routes) to introduce students to various environmental injustices. It will illustrate how students can use story maps, such as those created with ArcGIS, to highlight correlations between different variables (e.g., location, pollutants, income, race/ethnicity) in compelling, creative, and user-friendly ways. After students are introduced to data science practices through ArcGIS StoryMaps (using real-time data such as those from airnow.gov), students then have opportunities to design solutions that redress the injustices. Specifically, these curricula will focus on how student engineering teams designed, built, and tested model electric vehicles (EV) to understand how EVs significantly reduce highway emissions. ...
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