Introducing "Sustainability and Social Commitment" skills in an engineering degree

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal to develop “Sustainability and Social Commitment" skills (SSC) in engineering degree curricula. The proposal is based on providing general education in SSC to teachers (in particular, the relationship between SSC and their field of knowledge) and SSC-related material for each subject, as well as developing learning and assessment methods for these skills. Unlike other proposals advocating the existence of a few specific subjects that include SSC, the authors propose to integrate these skills into different subjects throughout the curriculum. The existence of a global mechanism for the coordination and assessment of SSC skills is also proposed. Finally, the paper explains the introduction of SSC into the Barcelona School of Informatics Computing Engineering Degree at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC-BarcelonaTECH), providing examples of how to deal with SSC within the subjects of the degree. While the experience is based on a Computing Degree, the ideas and methodology can be extended to other technical studies.