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Sustainability is a vital interdisciplinary concept to address within engineering education. Furthermore, the natural connections that exist between sustainability and social justice provide an optimal opportunity to integrate both into curricula. We argue that engineering curricula ought to include sustainability and social justice so future engineers are trained to understand both societal and technical implications of their work, while acknowledging the challenges engineering faculty may face in conceptualizing social justice or social sustainability. We then highlight how new sustainable design rating systems, such as Envision and The Living Building Challenge, embed inclusion and social justice into their ratings and how these sustainability rating systems can help engineering faculty bring social justice into their classrooms in ways that meaningfully link to engineering content. Finally, we present two examples of how sustainability and social justice can be incorporated into the civil engineering curriculum through inclusive pedagogy and new curricula: 1) a semester-long effort to document, design, and improve the inclusive pedagogical practices in a first-year engineering course that included the theme of sustainability throughout much of the class meetings; and 2) a new assignment about the Envision rating system and the societal implications of rebuilding a major component of regional infrastructure. We conclude with recommendations that other instructors can use to begin incorporating social justice in their courses. 

The purpose of this paper is to detail the initial validation of a scale to assess engineering students’ attitudes toward the value of diversity in engineering and their intentions to enact inclusive behaviors. In study 1, we administered the scale four times. We subjected the first administration to exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and the remaining three administrations to both confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and tests of longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI). All tests indicated strong evidence for the internal structure of the factor structure of the survey. The four factors were: engineers should value diversity to (a) fulfill a greater purpose and (b) serve customers better; and engineers should (c) challenge discriminatory behavior and (d) promote a healthy work environment. In study 2, we again assessed the structure of the data as described in study 1 and then used the scale to assess potential differences between undergraduate students who participated in activities designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) (n=116) and those who did not (n=137). Students in the intervention classes demonstrated a small statistically significant increase in their intention to promote a healthy team environment in reference to the comparison classes. No differences were observed between the classes on the other factors. Future directions and implications are discussed.