How can a progression in teaching for sustainable development be achieved in engineering education?
Depending on whether you are scientist in chemistry, physics, social sciences or engineering you will choose different angles to discuss and teach for sustainable development. To be prepared for the future students must be encouraged to learn interdisciplinary and take part in different views in the debate.
In higher education the teachers are often experts in a specific scientific area, and thus they may feel
uncomfortable in teaching sustainable development in an interdisciplinary way. Nor are they comfortable with the opposing views of questions that will arise in a classroom debate.
The use of teaching tools, such as kits, games and role-play can be effective ways of improving efficiency, demonstrating opposing views and encouraging an element of collaboration in a non-threatening environment.
Interdisciplinary topics are naturally invoked during the playing. As an example; Jon-Erik Dahlin has been involved in sustainability teaching at several programmes at the KTH (Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden) using board games (Dahlin 2016), e.g. mechanical and chemical engineering.
A scheme of how to encompass progression of modules for teaching sustainable development has been suggested and implemented to various degrees at different programs at KTH, figure 1.
Fig. 1 How to use different learning modules to achieve a progression of learning for sustainable development, (Dahlin 2018)
The aim of this project is to study the integration and progression of teaching for sustainable development in some different programs at KTH.
Preliminary results
We have studied teachers and students from several programmes at KTH, eg “Civilingenjör- och
högskoleingenjör i maskinteknik” where board games as teaching tools have been used since 2010. That is- long enough that there are alumni students to interview. We have also interviewed teachers that have not encountered teaching tools for sustainability in their programs.
Some of the questions we have asked the teachers:
How do you and your colleagues work with integration of sustainable development in your courses?
How do you encompass the interdisciplinary questions in sustainability?
How do you address normative questions about sustainability?
How is the progression of teaching for sustainable development at your program?
The qualitative data has been analysed with discourse analysis (Öhman 2010), to view different norms, values and strategies in teaching for sustainable development at different programs at KTH. We will present some preliminary results and analysis.
References
Dahlin J.-E. (2016), ”The merit of educational games in sustainability education”. In: 8th International
Conference on Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (4-7 September 2016, Bruges, Belgium)
Dahlin J.-E. (2018), Slides presented at the Cetis programme network at KTH.
Öhman, M. (2010). Analysing the direction of socialisation from a power perspective. Sport, Education and Society, 15, 393–409. doi:10.1080/13573322.2010.514735.
