SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION

At present, education has challenges to adequately react to the sustainability crisis taking place all around us. Education should provide students with competences, which help them to act in a changing world, bringing it towards a sustainable future. The impacts of the sustainability crisis, climate change or loss of biodiversity are usually not very common topics in the discussion on the development of education: how education should react and ensure competences and motivation to mitigate them. However, higher education institutions (HEIs) are now increasingly responding to the challenge and taking action to promote sustainability. In Finland, HEIs have published their programmes to advance sustainable development (SD) and responsibility in education. These programmes cover the practical steps for embedding sustainability issues in education. In addition, the CDIO framework for engineering education has added the optional standard for engineering education to contribute to sustainable development as a key competence. In this paper, we first discuss the key concepts and challenges in embedding sustainable development in education and the learning objectives. We explore how higher education (HE) in Finland introduces the practical steps in embedding SD in education and describe this implementation process at Turku University of Applied Sciences (Turku UAS) in Finland. The special focus of our description is on the work in progress in the engineering programmes at Turku UAS. Because the CDIO optional standard in SD was launched quite recently, the work is in progress and there are still several open questions and challenges. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these challenges and share best practices to be able to genuinely incorporate SD into engineering education.