Introducing sustainable development in engineering education: competences, pedagogy and curriculum

Abstract

Introducing sustainable development (SD) in engineering education has been a key topic in many technological universities [1], accreditation agencies and International and National networks of universities. At the UNESCO chair of Sustainability of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) under their PhD program on Sustainability the authors have carried out a research on: 1. Which SD competences may engineers have when graduating? 2. How should SD competences be taught/learned at technological universities? 3. Which curriculum structure is more suitable to facilitate the acquisition of SD competences? To evaluate the competences we compared three leading European universities in introduction of SD. The competences are classified in three categories: knowledge and understanding, skills and abilities and attitudes [2]. To evaluate the pedagogical approach that facilitates the SD learning we analysed 10 case studies of courses on Sustainability from 5 European technological universities. We used conceptual maps [3, 4] as assessment tool. To analyse the curriculum design for SD 50 experts on curriculum design and teaching SD courses were interviewed. The methodology and results of this work are presented and recommendations to introduce SD in technological universities in the three fields: competences, pedagogy and curriculum are suggested.