Educating Engineering Educators for Sustainability – a case of online resources for staff development

Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) has been on the agenda for decades in order for engineers to develop sustainable technology for future societies. Increased international attention to the signs of an overarching sustainability crisis have further increased the sense of urgency in order to move from sustainable discourse to actions – in industry as well as in educational systems. At Aalborg University, several actions have been taken in order to highlight the importance of sustainability in engineering and science education. As an example, in the beginning of the 1990s, all engineering students entering the University were placed in inter-disciplinary groups and faced with sustainability as a crosscutting semester theme. Likewise sustainability in different shades has been introduced as semester themes within programmes initiating engineering and science students to identify, analyse, formulate and address sustainability challenges in science and engineering. Furthermore, sustainability issues have been introduced in workshops for students and staff, and sustainability has been an integrated perspective in the developments of new prototypes and products in problem based projects. The challenges have however been to balance the focus on sustainability with more domain specific perspectives – to foster engineers with enough engagement and knowledge to contribute to a sustainable development in their everyday practice, and knowing when to bring in sustainability specialist when needed. The comprehensiveness of the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals have recently underlined the need for combining the generic with the specific in meaningful ways in order to cope with the complexity of the sustainability challenge. In this practice paper, we present an initiative to support staff in engineering and science to integrate sustainability in their educational practice. The online resources are organised in three stages of ambition supporting staff in: i) making students aware of the sustainability challenges in relation to their study domain, ii) providing students with an entrance to know more about sustainability, and finally yet importantly iii) empower students to do more and take action in their project to contribute to a more sustainable development. As such, the on-line resources are presented as a way to frame education for sustainability for engineering and science students, as a stepping-stone for staff to appropriate EESD for specific programmes.