Strengthening our wings of equity to empower civil engineering students to navigate our challenging world: embedding environmental justice, sustainability science, equity, diversity and inclusion across an undergraduate program

Abstract

Civil engineers are charged with safeguarding public welfare, yet traditional curricula often separate technical design from questions of equity, environmental justice and sustainability. This case study describes a bottom-up, program-wide initiative in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Victoria (Canada) designed to embed equity-centred competencies across an accredited undergraduate curriculum. Framed through the metaphor of two complementary “wings”, technical excellence and equity-centred practice. We conceptualize equity as a design goal, an epistemological grounding that broadens whose knowledge counts, and a professional competency that can be explicitly developed and assessed. Between 2022 and 2024, faculty collaboratively developed 23 lecture modules and eight in-class activities integrated across required second- and third-year courses with extensions for first- and fourth-year courses. We describe the motivations, institutional context, development process, and three illustrative course examples in water resources, transportation engineering, and drinking water contaminants. Reflections highlight enabling conditions (institutional alignment, dedicated funding, faculty champions), tensions (time constraints, resistance, balancing technical and equity content), and lessons learned about mainstreaming equity within required courses. We argue that embedding equity, rather than appending it, strengthens accreditation-aligned graduate attributes, enhances student engagement, and better prepares graduates for the realities of contemporary civil engineering practice. This case offers transferable questions and practical strategies for departments seeking to integrate equity-centred approaches at the program scale.