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Introduction
Introduction
Sustainability and justice have always been at the core of my work, both in the classroom and in my research. When I joined the Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering (CAEE) department less than two years ago, I saw a real opportunity to bring these values more explicitly into the curriculum. Earlier this year, I came across the American Society for Engineering Education’s Engineering for One Planet initiative (ASEE-EOP), which offers mini-grants, mentorship, and a community of practice to support faculty like me who want to integrate sustainability into engineering education through the EOP framework.
The EOP framework is a practical tool designed to embed sustainability into all areas of engineering education. Developed by The Lemelson Foundation in partnership with VentureWell and supported by the National Science Foundation, it outlines 92 sustainability-focused learning outcomes (46 core and 46 advanced) for all engineering students, regardless of discipline. The framework integrates sustainability and systems thinking into engineering education by embedding environmental, social, and economic principles across core competencies. It encourages engineering students to consider planetary boundaries, life cycles, and ethical responsibility in their designs and decisions.
My proposal for the ASEE-EOP project was to create a sustainability roadmap within our department, where I identified ten key courses that offered great potential to integrate sustainability concepts from exposure to competency building, to mastery. The timing worked in our favor: with Drexel’s Academic Transformation and switch to semesters, there is a unique opportunity to redesign our curriculum, and the CAEE department leadership is committed to transforming our programs and making them more relevant to the real-world challenges we face today.
When I joined the Climate Pedagogy Incubator, I realized something that had been on my mind for a while: the EOP framework is solid, but it could benefit deeply from stronger integration with climate education and justice. Engineers don’t just need to understand systems—they need to understand power, inequality, and the lived experiences of the communities most impacted by climate change.
At the same time, most engineering faculty lack formal pedagogical training in these complex, interdisciplinary topics. While interest is growing, the time, expertise, and resources required to create meaningful educational materials often pose significant barriers. Scaffold was developed to address this gap: an AI-powered assistant designed to support engineering instructors in developing course content, assignments, modules, and learning outcomes grounded in sustainability and justice. By lowering the threshold for entry and scaling the capacity to create high-quality, contextualized materials, Scaffold enables broader adoption of transformative teaching practices across engineering departments and institutions.
The name Scaffold reflects the tool’s core purpose: to provide temporary, supportive structure that helps faculty build something lasting. Like scaffolding in construction, it’s not the final product—it’s a framework that supports learning, experimentation, and growth. Most engineering faculty aren’t trained in sustainability or justice pedagogy, and many feel uncertain about where to start. Scaffold offers guidance without prescribing answers, helping educators assemble their own approaches with confidence. The name also signals humility: this tool is not the solution, but a support system for faculty doing the hard, transformative work of rethinking engineering education.
Figure 1. The EOP Framework.
When I joined the Climate Pedagogy Incubator, I realized something that had been on my mind for a while: the EOP framework is solid, but it could benefit deeply from stronger integration with climate education and justice. Engineers don’t just need to understand systems—they need to understand power, inequality, and the lived experiences of the communities most impacted by climate change.
At the same time, most engineering faculty lack formal pedagogical training in these complex, interdisciplinary topics. While interest is growing, the time, expertise, and resources required to create meaningful educational materials often pose significant barriers. Scaffold was developed to address this gap: an AI-powered assistant designed to support engineering instructors in developing course content, assignments, modules, and learning outcomes grounded in sustainability and justice. By lowering the threshold for entry and scaling the capacity to create high-quality, contextualized materials, Scaffold enables broader adoption of transformative teaching practices across engineering departments and institutions.
The name Scaffold reflects the tool’s core purpose: to provide temporary, supportive structure that helps faculty build something lasting. Like scaffolding in construction, it’s not the final product—it’s a framework that supports learning, experimentation, and growth. Most engineering faculty aren’t trained in sustainability or justice pedagogy, and many feel uncertain about where to start. Scaffold offers guidance without prescribing answers, helping educators assemble their own approaches with confidence. The name also signals humility: this tool is not the solution, but a support system for faculty doing the hard, transformative work of rethinking engineering education.
The tool
The tool
ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI that generates human-like text responses to questions and prompts. A custom GPT is a tailored version of ChatGPT designed for a specific purpose, audience, or workflow. It can include specialized instructions, knowledge, and tools to better support tasks like teaching, research, or writing. Users can build or use these versions to get more relevant and context-aware assistance.
Scaffold is a custom GPT.
I built Scaffold to offer engineering faculty support grounded in climate pedagogy and tailored to their specific teaching context. It’s designed to prioritize justice, systems thinking, and transformative learning—not just technical content. Scaffold adapts to the user’s needs: it can offer reflective, theory-based input or direct, actionable ideas, depending on the kind of help someone is looking for. Scaffold’s insights are based on a library of pedagogical resources that include the EOP framework, Climate Pedagogy Incubator readings, and academic literature on sustainability, climate, and social justice in engineering education.
The tool was designed to avoid shallow advice, techno-fixes, or moralizing, and to never assume there’s one right way to teach about climate. Instead, it treats educators as co-designers and encourages curiosity, care, and experimentation. Its suggestions are always framed around course type, learning goals, and the user’s disciplinary lens, with the goal of helping faculty integrate climate content in ways that are meaningful and sustainable.
Figure 2. Scaffold's inferface.
Scaffold is still in the pilot stage, so right now it can only handle up to 20 PDF files at a time. That means it’s pulling information from a small, curated set of resources, which works for early testing but isn’t great for deeper or more comprehensive analysis. The next step is to move past this cap by using Python to build an open-source version with Llama—a large language model that’s designed to run more efficiently on local machines. With Llama, we’ll be able to upload and process hundreds of papers and resources, giving the model a much deeper and broader knowledge base to draw from.
The pilot version of Scaffold demonstrates promise. In the next section, I’ll present a few of Scaffold’s answers for different prompts that simulate engineering faculty asking for help to incorporate sustainability and climate education into their courses. Then, I’ll discuss the next steps to refine Scaffold and make this project scalable.
The library
The library
The pilot version of Scaffold was fed the following references.
Alqarni AMZ, Afy-Shararah M, Salonitis K (2023) Integrating Sustainability into Engineering Curricula: Challenges, Framework, and Impact on Student Competencies in Saudi Arabian Higher Education. In: Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering. IOS Press BV, pp 175–180
Andruk C, Altinay Z (2022) Campus sustainability in an entrepreneurial framework. Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development 29:484–501. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSBED-01-2021-0023
Ballew MT, Goldberg MH, Rosenthal SA, et al (2018) Climate Change Activism among Latino and White Americans. Front Commun (Lausanne) 3:. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2018.00058
Besong F, Holland C (2015) The Dispositions, Abilities and Behaviours (Dab) Framework for Profiling Learners’ Sustainability Competencies in Higher Education. Journal of Teacher Education for Sustainability 17:5–22. https://doi.org/10.1515/jtes-2015-0001
Brundiers K, Wiek A, Redman CL (2010) Real-world learning opportunities in sustainability: from classroom into the real world. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 11:308–324. https://doi.org/10.1108/14676371011077540
Cörvers R, Wiek A, de Kraker J, et al (2016) Problem-Based and Project-Based Learning for Sustainable Development. In: Sustainability Science. Springer Netherlands, pp 349–358
Iverson ER, Wetzstein LJ (2020) Connecting Learning About the Earth to Societal Issues: Downstream Effects on Faculty Teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning 2020:35–52. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20372
Kanapathy S, Lee KE, Mokhtar M, et al (2021) A framework for integrating sustainable development concepts into the chemistry curriculum towards achieving education for sustainable development in Malaysia. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 22:1421–1449. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-07-2020-0241
Landrum NE (2021) The Global Goals: bringing education for sustainable development into US business schools. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 22:1336–1350. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-10-2020-0395
Leal Filho W, Shiel C, Paço A, et al (2019) Sustainable Development Goals and sustainability teaching at universities: Falling behind or getting ahead of the pack? J Clean Prod 232:285–294. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.05.309
Lozano R, Merrill MY, Sammalisto K, et al (2017) Connecting competences and pedagogical approaches for sustainable development in higher education: A literature review and framework proposal. Sustainability (Switzerland) 9:. https://doi.org/10.3390/su9101889
Menon S, Suresh M (2022) Development of assessment framework for environmental sustainability in higher education institutions. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education 23:1445–1468. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-07-2021-0310
MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit: Research, tools, and tips for teaching climate justice to undergraduates across disciplines
Oziewicz M, Kleese N (Eds.)(2023) Climate Literacy in Education: A pocket journal for teachers [Special Issue]. Climate Literacy in Education 1:1
Rose G, Ryan K, Desha C (2015) Implementing a holistic process for embedding sustainability: A case study in first year engineering, Monash University, Australia. In: Journal of Cleaner Production. Elsevier Ltd, pp 229–238
The Lemelson Foundation (2022) The Engineering for One Planet Framework: Essential sustainability-focused learning outcomes for engineering education. The Lemelson Foundation, Portland, Oregon, USA
Vander Ark T, Liebtag E, McClennen N (2020a) An Introduction to Place-Based Education. In: The Power of Place: Authentic Learning Through Place-Based Education. ASCD, pp 1–8
Vander Ark T, Liebtag E, McClennen N (2020b) A Place-Based Education How-to Guide. In: The Power of Place: Authentic Learning Through Place-Based Education. ASCD, pp 98–130
Vander Ark T, Liebtag E, McClennen N (2020c) Why Place Matters. In: The Power of Place: Authentic Learning Through Place-Based Education. ASCD, pp 9–20
Wiek A, Withycombe L, Redman CL (2011) Key competencies in sustainability: A reference framework for academic program development. Sustain Sci 6:203–218
The results
The results
The linked document shows samples of Scaffold’s word-by-word response for different prompts. The results demonstrate Scaffold’s potential as a brainstorming tool to assist engineering faculty when planning their courses’ modules, activities, projects, and learning outcomes. See this document for a comparison of ChatGPT vs. Scaffold (the custom GPT) on their answers to the same prompt: I want students to think critically about materials and extraction—any pedagogy strategies or readings?
In these trials, Scaffold provided more focused answers, suggesting specific methods and resources that faculty can further explore. For example, “LCA with justice lens” from ChatGPT gives generic advice: incorporate qualitative impacts into LCA tools, which is not an intuitive or specific task and requires specialized software and databases. Conversely, the “Flipped classrooms and co-teaching” strategy from Scaffold offers a more specific suggestion (to assign readings or video content on extractive histories or material justice), tied to the flipped classrooms method.
ChatGPT is also notorious for providing references that do not exist (it often mixes titles, authors, and publishers). “The Material Basis of Energy Transitions” is a book, but it was not written by Julia Steinberger. In contrast, Scaffold offers reading suggestions based on a curated library. Scaffold also recommended assignments and classroom activities, which is embedded into its instructions.
Next steps
Next steps
The pilot version of Scaffold is shareable (here’s the link if you want to give it a try!). I plan to use it as a brainstorming tool, as demonstrated above, while I work with my colleagues on the ASEE-EOP project. But Scaffold will need more work before it becomes more scalable. Right now, I will use what I learned in the Climate Pedagogy Incubator to filter through and build upon Scaffold’s suggestions. In the future, however, I want Scaffold to become a more robust and reliable source of ideas for climate education, without depending on my intervention.
For that to work, I would like to work on a few things:
First, I want to expand Scaffold’s capability by transitioning from ChatGPT to Llama to allow for the inclusion of more relevant literature.
Second, I want to curate a larger bibliography — hopefully with the collaboration of the Climate Pedagogy Incubator team (a.k.a. Incubeauties!).
Third, also in collaboration with a team of interested parties, I would like to critically analyze Scaffold’s suggestions and identify areas for improvement. Finally, the goal is to disseminate Scaffold through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations, sharing both its theoretical foundations and practical applications.
Ultimately, I see Scaffold as a powerful AI-powered assistant for engineering faculty—one that delivers evidence-based insights on climate pedagogy and sustainability, supports alignment of learning outcomes and activities with ABET accreditation criteria, and inspires educators to broaden their perspectives. If successful, Scaffold will empower faculty to innovate in the classroom and experiment with transformative approaches to teaching and learning.
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