Educating engineers for/in sustainable development? What we knew, what we learned, and what we should learn

Abstract

In the past decade, several engineering universities, mainly in Europe, but also in Australia, North America, and Japan, have been addressing the issue of sustainable development. Engineering education in sustainable development has been discussed at many occasions. What questions have been addressed, what answers have been provided, and what are the main remaining topics for research into engineering education in sustainable development? What should engineers learn regarding sustainable development? How to trigger institutional change within engineering schools: top-down or bottom-up? How to trigger cultural change, how to win the hearts and souls of the faculty? Curriculum change: starting new programs or changing existing ones? The contribution of active learning and project based learning? The role of external stakeholders, external cooperation? How to measure sustainable development learning effects? Practice what you preach: how to green the campus, diminish resource consumption and sustainabilise procurement? How to teach normative content in an academic context? The paper, based mainly on the European literature on EESD of the last decade, discusses the answers that were provided and present an agenda for further research in EESD (This paper has mainly a European perspective. An overview of sustainable development engineering education in the U