TY - CHAP
T1 - A Case for Enterprise Engagement in Multi-stage Sustainability Education for University Engineering Students
AU - Treacy, Thomas
AU - Delaney, Kevin
AU - McCloskey, Rosarie
AU - O’Hora, Niamh
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - Future engineering graduates will need to address key societal challenges relating to sustainability. Exposing engineering students to simulated real world challenges where they must fully define a problem, ideate, and storyboard potential solutions helps them develop and refine their engineering capabilities. Grouping students from different stages and programmes of study, where the implicit peer-to-peer learning can be of tremendous benefit to students, facilitates a broader range of experience. Furthermore, as part of their professional formation such collaboration exposes students to other available educational opportunities. Engagement with enterprise partners to address some of the challenges these partners face, exposes university students to relevant approximations of professional practice relating to sustainability. Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) has piloted activities with enterprises to help equip students address and solve sustainability issues and encourage them to develop and practice the attitudes, technical and non-technical skills required. The aim of this work is to explain how TU Dublin encourages competence building relating to sustainability within the undergraduate mechanical engineering student cohort through extra-curricular enterprise-engagement activities. More specifically, this chapter describes a pilot programme initiated by the School of Mechanical Engineering in TU Dublin during the academic year 2022–23, in co-operation with an industry partner. The goal was to reinforce the importance of the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals and help engineering students develop and contextualise the competences and skills needed as they embark on their careers whilst simultaneously giving them experience of enterprise engagement. Other educators working on competence building in sustainable development of students will benefit from the details of the case study presented.
AB - Future engineering graduates will need to address key societal challenges relating to sustainability. Exposing engineering students to simulated real world challenges where they must fully define a problem, ideate, and storyboard potential solutions helps them develop and refine their engineering capabilities. Grouping students from different stages and programmes of study, where the implicit peer-to-peer learning can be of tremendous benefit to students, facilitates a broader range of experience. Furthermore, as part of their professional formation such collaboration exposes students to other available educational opportunities. Engagement with enterprise partners to address some of the challenges these partners face, exposes university students to relevant approximations of professional practice relating to sustainability. Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) has piloted activities with enterprises to help equip students address and solve sustainability issues and encourage them to develop and practice the attitudes, technical and non-technical skills required. The aim of this work is to explain how TU Dublin encourages competence building relating to sustainability within the undergraduate mechanical engineering student cohort through extra-curricular enterprise-engagement activities. More specifically, this chapter describes a pilot programme initiated by the School of Mechanical Engineering in TU Dublin during the academic year 2022–23, in co-operation with an industry partner. The goal was to reinforce the importance of the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals and help engineering students develop and contextualise the competences and skills needed as they embark on their careers whilst simultaneously giving them experience of enterprise engagement. Other educators working on competence building in sustainable development of students will benefit from the details of the case study presented.
KW - Authentic assessment
KW - Enterprise engagement
KW - Extra-curricular
KW - Sustainability teaching
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105000273276
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-80380-2_6
DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-80380-2_6
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:105000273276
T3 - World Sustainability Series
SP - 105
EP - 126
BT - World Sustainability Series
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
ER -