Conversations: Teaching Sustainability In Engineering

Our research focuses on embedding sustainability in the engineering curriculum in ways that are efficient, coherent and inclusive. An important strand of work within this wider remit is finding suitable approaches for promoting collaboration between institutions and academics and advance the understanding of what ‘sustainability’ means in engineering education in the first place, by producing reliable data that can inform our future practice, leading to institutional change. In this paper, we report and discuss the organisation and the findings of a series of inter-institutional conversations that took place during two in person workshops, with the central theme of embedding sustainability in the engineering curriculum, held at a University in the UK during spring 2022 and the online meetings and interactions that followed. These meetings provided an opportunity for engineering educators from universities in the southwest of England to share experiences from their current practice when teaching about and for sustainability. The workshops explored the feasibility of setting up of an online platform for sharing teaching and learning resources and techniques, all relating to sustainability issues in an engineering education context.