Teaching Sustainability in Materials Science and Engineering (and Beyond).

Since 2008 we have been teaching various aspects of sustainability to undergraduate students at Iowa State University. In our first courses we introduced the ideas of sustainability in the context of global development. These courses were taught mostly to engineering students and took primarily a technical view of sustainability, both in the class room and on the ground in Africa. Since 2010, however, our focus has been on a course that presents a very broad view of sustainability to a highly diverse set of students from all parts of the University. This course presents interesting challenges owing to the breadth of the material and the rather large range of technical knowledge and skills (especially in mathematics) of the students. Our goals are to guide the students to a better understanding of the challenges of sustainability given the many constraints. Since there is a clear need for broadly creating a more informed view of sustainability, this course is the focus of today's talk. In it we will present our basic objectives for the course and our approach to covering the broad and disparate range of material. Having taught the course six (and a fraction) times, we will also comment on what we feel works well and what is still evolving.\\ \\In collaboration with K.M. Bryden, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University and A.Hallam, Department of Economics, Iowa State University