Christianos A.G. Burlotos

Strategies for embedding engineering for sustainable development in undergraduate teaching

The significant challenges of sustainable development necessitate that we equip the next generation of engineers with the skills, knowledge, and values needed to mitigate climate change, manage global risks, and design a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable future. Professional organizations and NGOs have echoed this call via initiatives and accreditation requirements. Similarly, researchers have already defined the student competencies, pedagogies, and conceptual frameworks needed to support the integration of engineering for sustainable development (ESD). Moreover, numerous case studies describe innovative actions already taken at universities around the world, but they have not yet been synthesized into a generalizable methodology for embedding ESD. Through a thematic literature review, a key gap has been identified: the lack of a comprehensive, literature-based approach that defines a clear path for individual professors to embed ESD. Thus, this study asks: What are the key strategies that instructors could use to embed ESD in core undergraduate engineering courses?

To understand the lived experience and current efforts of professors working to integrate ESD, five semi-structured exploratory interviews were conducted. Then, to ground the recommended strategies in the strong base of existing literature, a case study review was performed; 29 journal articles and 22 conference papers describing specific efforts to incorporate ESD were collected and thematically analyzed. The pedagogies, approaches, and insights identified were synthesized into a list of strategies, which were then validated with an additional 16 semi-structured interviews.

This dissertation presents a synthesized list of literature-based strategies that define an explicit, actionable pathway for any motivated instructor in any engineering discipline to fulfil their teaching of accreditation-required technical content in ways that simultaneously support the development of ESD competencies. This bottom-up approach allows professors to learn from the case studies already available and act immediately, independent of resource-intensive, top-down university programming. Additionally, discipline-specific examples, potential barriers, and implementation recommendations are presented to support the adoption of these strategies.