PROVIDING A SYNERGISTIC EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE – A CASE STUDY USING AN ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING SEQUENCE

The Environmental Engineering Sequence at the United States Military Academy enables students to experience classroom discussions come to life during field trips and laboratories. The required three-course sequence for non-engineering majors strives to provide students a foundation of fundamental environmental scientific facts and principles, an understanding of the environmental engineering process by which these principles are applied to improve human health, and the capacity to use sound methods for analyzing scientific and technical matters. To successfully integrate course material into a comprehensive learning experience, it is necessary to use very deliberate arrangements of student preparation, classroom instruction, in and out of class problems, laboratory exercises, and field trips. Executing this calculated curriculum enables students to maximize their learning and internalize lesson material. Multiple blocks throughout the sequence accomplish this task by examining topics such as air pollution, drinking water treatment, and wastewater treatment. As an example, the block on drinking water treatment demonstrates a deliberate arrangement of material incorporating six classroom lessons sequentially walking through a treatment plant, one laboratory, one homework, and a field trip to the campus drinking water treatment plant. During this field trip, students walk through the treatment plant in the same sequence as the lessons taught and see active laboratory work similar to completed student laboratories. The field trip is used as an interactive venue to reinforce lessons learned in the classroom through inquiry-based discussions referencing in and out of class problem solving and laboratory work. The curriculum has the flexibility for the placement of laboratories and field trips to occur almost anywhere in the block which is essential to support the large enrollment of about 170 students taught in 12 different sections. This approach is similarly used for the wastewater treatment block and could be incorporated into a variety of other fields of study to provide students with unique synergistic educational experiences.