What do EESD “experts” thinksustainability is?Which pedagogy

is suitable to learn it?Results from interviews and Cmaps analysis

gathered at EESD 2008

Jordi SegalasSchool of Engineering of Vilanova i la Geltru,

Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech, Barcelona, Spain

Karel F. MulderTechnology Dynamics and Sustainable Development,

Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, and

Didac Ferrer-BalasInstitute of Sustainability,

Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study how experts on teaching sustainability inengineering education contextualize sustainability; also to evaluate the understanding ofsustainability by engineering students. The final aim is to evaluate what pedagogy experts believeprovides better opportunities for learning about sustainability in engineering education.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors used conceptual maps (cmaps) analysis withtwo taxonomies of four and ten categories. The first taxonomy clusters the significance of sustainabilityin environmental, technological, social and institutional aspects and shows the main trends; the second (of tencategories) divides the previous categories into greater detail. To evaluate the experts’ cmaps two indiceswere defined that provide information about what experts think sustainability ismost related to and evaluatehow complex they see the sustainability concept. In total, 500 students from five European engineeringuniversities were then surveyed and the results compared with those of the experts. Finally, interviews wereheld with experts to try to determine the best pedagogy to apply to achieve learning around sustainability.

Findings – The results show that Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) expertsconsider that institutional and social aspects are more relevant to sustainability than environmental andtechnological ones. The results were compared with the understanding of sustainability by a sample ofmore than 500 engineering students who had taken courses on sustainability at five technical universitiesin Europe. This comparison shows a mismatch among the EESD “experts’” and the students’understanding of sustainability, which suggest that sustainability courses in engineering degrees shouldemphasise the social and institutional aspects versus environmental and technological ones. Moreover,courses should emphasize more the complexity of sustainability.

Originality/value – The paper emphasizes the lack of priority that social and institutional aspectsare given in sustainability courses and promotes a discussion about how these two elements andcomplex thinking can increase their importance in the engineering curriculum.

Keywords Europe, Universities, Curricula, Engineering education, Sustainability,Sustainable development, Learning assessment, Experts, Students, Conceptual maps, Pedagogy

Paper type Research paper

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at

www.emeraldinsight.com/1467-6370.htm

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Received 27 April 2011Revised 18 September 2011Accepted 10 February 2012

International Journal of Sustainabilityin Higher Education

Vol. 13 No. 3, 2012pp. 293-304

q Emerald Group Publishing Limited1467-6370

DOI 10.1108/14676371211242599

IntroductionEducation for sustainable development (ESD) has been on the agenda of manyengineering faculties since the late 1990s. Many approaches have been developed toproduce well-trained graduate engineers with the knowledge, abilities, values andattitudes needed to contribute to SD. However, what SD competences shouldengineering students obtain at university? Some studies (Segalas et al., 2009;Svanstrom et al., 2008) reveal that these competences are mainly related to criticalthinking, systemic thinking, the ability to work within transdisciplinary frameworksand to develop values consistent with the sustainability paradigm.

The next question is how to teach/learn these competences. Which pedagogicalstrategies are more suitable to learn key SD competences? What kind of education isneeded? In relation to SD, so far, there is no direct relation between educated societies(i.e. those with the highest proportion of “educated” citizens) and societies with the“highest” levels of sustainability. Quoting Schumacher (1973):

The volume of education [. . .] continues to increase, yet so do pollution, exhaustion of resources,and the dangers of ecological catastrophe. If still more education is to save us, it would have to beeducation of a different kind: an education that takes us into the depth of things.

Sustainability demands a specific kind of learning. Some authors call for a deep changein society to achieve a sustainable society. “Sustainable Development is not just amatter or acquiring some extra knowledge. Attitude is also important. Moreover, it isoften necessary to change social structures” (Mulder, 2006).

When analyzing pedagogical methodologies and their suitability to teaching/learningSD in engineering universities, the state of the art (Azapagic et al., 2004; BarcelonaDeclaration, 2004; Canadell, 2006; Van Dam-Mieras, 2006; Dawe, 2005; Eagan et al., 2002;Harpet, 2006; Holmberg and Samuelsson, 2006; Segalas et al., 2007; Sterling, 2004a, b;Yuan, 2001) shows that there is consensus about the need to move from amechanistic/traditional way of teaching to an ecological/alternative one in order toallow engineering students to achieve SD competences in both cognitive (knowledge andunderstanding) and meta-cognitive (skills and abilities and attitudes) domains.

A conclusion of the analyses is that the approaches have high commonalities. Mostof the competences are related:

. Critical thinking is regularly mentioned explicitly and implicitly in sets ofcompetences. The mental processes of discernment, analysis and evaluationfrom an open-minded point of view are often highlighted.

. Systemic thinking is any process of estimating or inferring how local policies,actions, or changes influence the state of the broader universe. It is an approach toproblem solving that views “problems” as parts of an overall system, rather thanreacting to present outcomes or events and potentially contributing to furtherdevelopment of the undesired issue or problem (O’Connor and McDermott, 1997).

. Inter-trans-disciplinarity is also important for SD, taking into account both theparticipation of different professionals to solve problems and the involvement ofstakeholders in processes that are seen as experts’ jobs.

. Values and ethics are at the core of the meta-cognitive sets of competences. Theyare shown as the main force to change personal and professional attitudes for SDengagement.

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During the international conference on Engineering Education in SD held at theGraz University of Technology in October 2008, a workshop was carried out whereparticipants were asked to give their opinion about which pedagogy is better to learnsustainability at engineering universities. Moreover, in a plenary session, the expertsparticipating in the conference were asked to draw a conceptual map which answers tothe focus question: what is sustainability? The results of the conceptual map analysisallowed to evaluate quantitatively the understanding of sustainability by the expertswhich reinforced the results of this research.

MethodologyThe evaluation of the experts understanding of sustainability was made usingconceptual maps (Cmaps) (Lourdel et al., 2007; Novak, 1998; Novak and Canas, 2008;Segalas et al., 2008). In this study, the Cmap method was used with the lowest degreeof directness (Ruiz-Primo, 2004), and no concept, linking line, linking phrase or Cmapstructure was provided to experts. The following assessment components wereconsidered in the analysis of the Cmaps: the number of concepts, the relevance ofconcepts, the number of links between concepts that belong to different categories andthe complexity of the Cmap.

To analyse the concepts within the CMaps, four main categories were used,along with a total of ten sub-categories, as shown in Table I.

Two indices were defined in order to evaluate the Cmaps (Segalas et al., 2010):

(1) Category relevance index (CR). This provides information about what studentsthink sustainability is most closely related to. It is evaluated using twoindicators:. Concept distribution among categories (CD). This evaluates the distribution

of concepts among categories, measured as the percentage of conceptsdevoted to a certain category:

TaxonomyFourcategories Ten categories Concepts and aspects considered

Environmental Environment Pollution, degradation, conservation, biodiversity, ecologicalfootprint, etc.

Resource scarcity Non-renewable resources, depletion of materials, etc.Social Social impact Quality of life, health, risk management, etc.

Values Ethics, respect for traditions and cultures, etc.Future (temporal) Future generations, scenario analysis, forecasting, backcasting,

etc.Unbalances(spatial)

The equity dimension, north-south cooperation, fair distributionof goods, fair use of resources, etc.

Economic Technology Best available technologies, industry, efficiency, cleantechnologies, energy, impact of technology, etc.

Economy Role of economy, fair trade, consumption patterns, etc.Institutional Education Role of education, rise of awareness, education institutions,

media’s role in education or disinformation, etc.Actors andstakeholders

Role of governments, NGOs, rules, laws, internationalagreements, individuals and societal stakeholders, etc.

Table I.Taxonomy of sustainable

development categories

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CDi ¼NCi

Pi¼NCai¼1 NCi

ð1Þ

where:

i is the category analysed.

NCi is the number of concepts per student per category.

NCa is the number of categories.

. The percentage of experts who assign concepts to a certain category (SC).Measured as:

SCi ¼NSi

NSð2Þ

where:

NS is the sample number of students who participate in the observation

NSi is the number of students that assign concepts to a specific category (NSi)

The category relevance is calculated by multiplying the two indicators:

CRi ¼CDi £ SCi

Pi¼NCai¼1 CDi £ SCi

ð3Þ

(2) Complexity index (CO). This evaluates how developed and interconnected theexperts find the concepts they have related to sustainability, that is, thecomplexity of their understanding of sustainability. Two indicators weremultiplied to obtain this value:

CO ¼ NC £ LCa ð4Þ

. Average number of concepts per student (NC).

. Relative measure of the connections between concepts that belong todifferent categories (LCa). This indicator normalises the number ofcategories and the number of experts, dividing the inter-category links bythe number of categories and the number of experts in the sample. It iscalculated as follows:

LCa ¼

Pj¼NSj¼1 NLj

NCa £ NSð5Þ

where: NL – is the number of inter-category links between concepts thatbelong to different categories (NL). The links to the sustainability concept arenot considered.

The complexity index can vary from zero to any value, depending on the number ofconcepts and the inter-category links. Figure 1 shows the complexity increase from a

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branched Cmap (a) where there are no link inter-categories, where it can be seen thatthe links between the same category concepts do not count as a link, to a more complexCmap (b) where there are fewer concepts but the categories are interlinked (linksinter-categories are in red).

The complexity results shown in this work were obtained using the four-categorytaxonomy.

The results of the experts Cmaps analysis were compared with a sample of ten casestudies of specific sustainability courses offered in five European technologicaluniversities, in which more than 500 students participated (Table II). Universities that

Figure 1.Example of increase in

complexity in Cmaps dueto increase of links

inter-categories

B12

B11

B1

B2

B

A

D

D1

B2

BD

D1

E

E2

C

C31 C33

C3

A

D3

D3D2

E

E2

E1

C

C1

C2

C3

C31

C32

C33

b1b

b

b

a

ac

c

c

c3

c3

c3

c2

c32

c1c1

c

ad

d

b

a

a

e

a

a

c

c

c3 c3

d

d

b2

b

c

e

d3

c3

b2

e2c33

d

d

a

e

e

e1c

b1

(a) (b)

Notes: (a) Low complexity (CO = 0); (b) high complexity (CO >> 0)

Code University Course ECTS Sample

UPC-1 Barcelona Tech – UPC Technology and sustainability 5 226UPC-2 Barcelona Tech – UPC Technology and sustainability 5 43UPC-3 Barcelona Tech – UPC Technology and environment 5 31UPC-4 Barcelona Tech – UPC International seminar on sustainable

technology5 19

DUT-1 Delft University of Technology Energy III 8 (0.7) 26DUT-2 Delft University of Technology Societal aspects of information

technology4

45CUT-1 Chalmers University of

TechnologyGlobal chemical sustainability 7 53

KPI-1 Kiev Polytechnic Institute Sustainable development 3 17EUT-1 Eindhoven University of

TechnologyTechnology and sustainability 3 28

EUT-2 Eindhoven University ofTechnology

Technology and sustainability 3 18Table II.

Sample of coursesanalysed

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represented different regions of Europe were selected (north, south, east and west).Courses were mainly selected on the basis of the willingness of the course coordinatorsto participate in the research.

The previous results allowed the study of the experts understanding of sustainability.Next step was to evaluate what experts propose as the most appropriate pedagogicalmethodologies to train engineering students in sustainability. For that purpose expertswere asked: “Which are the shift and the required transformation in the pedagogy used inEngineering Education Institutions to train engineers to become change agents forsustainability?” and “Which pedagogical approaches do you think that are moreappropriate to learn sustainability competences?”.

Results and discussionWhen analysing the conceptualization of sustainability by experts through the twoindicators the results are.

Category relevanceThe analysis of the experts’ Cmaps is shown in Figures 2 and 3.

Figure 2 shows the results of the concepts distribution (CDi), the percentage of expertswho assign concepts to a certain category (SCi) and the category relevance index (CRi).It shows that they relate sustainability mainly to social (30 per cent) and institutional(32 per cent) aspects and less to technological (21 per cent) and environmental (16 per cent)ones.

Figure 3 clusters the results in two areas: scientific/technological andsocial/institutional. It points up that experts give more value to the sociological role interms of how sustainability affects human-beings (social impact, unbalances, future) andhow problems relating to unsustainability can be solved (values, education andstakeholders).

Students’ results show (Figure 4) that their conceptions before taking the SD coursescontrast with those of the experts. Instead, they understand sustainability basically as atechnological (46 per cent) and environmental (34 per cent) issue and they hardly relate

Figure 2.Category relevance ofexperts’ Cmaps

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

17% 16%

89%

29%

95% 95%

Category Relevance Analysis

95%

InstitutionalEconomic & Technological

Cateory

SocialEnviornmental

Concepts distribution (CDi) Experts distribution (SCi) Category relevance (CRi)

30%21% 21%

32% 32%

Note: Four categories taxonomy

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it to social (8 per cent) or institutional (9 per cent) aspects. The results after taking thecourses are not much different: technological (40 per cent), environmental (31 per cent),institutional (16 per cent) and social (11 per cent). This reveals that students seesustainability basically as a scientific-technological subject whereby technologicalmeasures are applied to avoid and solve environmental problems.

Complexity indexTable III shows the inter-category links using the ten category taxonomy. The analysisof the partial number of inter-category links shows that the category most linked isStakeholders (62), followed by technology (51), social impact (49) and environment (48).

Relative inter-category links (equation (5)):

LCa ¼

Pj¼NSj¼1 NLj

NCa £ NS¼

238

10 £ 19¼ 1:25

Figure 4.Students

category-relevance indexvalues: Cmap1 (before)

and Cmap2 (after)

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%Social impactSocial impact

Stakeholders

Economy

Economy

Technology

Technology

Education Education

Institutional

Resources

EnvironmentEnvironment

Values ValuesFutureFutureUnbalances Unbalances

SocialTechnological/EconomicEnviornmental

BeforeBefore

After

After

Before Before

After

After

Scientific/technological role

Sociological role

Stakeholders

Resources

Figure 3.Category relevanceof experts’ Cmaps

Values

Future

Unbalances

Economy

Stakeholders

Environment

Resources

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Environmental

Social impact

Social

Technology

Technological/Economic

Education

Institutional

Sociological role

Scientific/technological role

Note: Ten categories taxonomy

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Applying equation (4) the complexity index by experts is:

CO ¼ NC £ LCa ¼ 24:80

Figure 5 compares the expert complexity index to the results obtained by students. Thevalue of the students’ complexity index was very low in most case studies. These lowresults might be explained by two reasons. The first one is that students perceive thatsustainability is not very related to social and institutional aspects, and therefore theyhardly included concepts in these areas. Another reason is that they barely seesustainability as a complex issue, so they mainly linked intra-category concepts andincluded few inter-category links. These results may be explained by the lack of SDunderstanding by students in terms of systemic thinking (inter-links) andtransdisciplinarity (no social and institutional concepts). The lack of social/institutionalthinking versus the scientific/technological role of SD may not be surprising given – thenature of the programmes the students are taking (i.e. explicitly eng/technologicalprogrammes) – the names of the modules themselves (most of the modules consideredhave the word “technology” in them). This is perhaps priming students so that they framesustainability in scientific/technological terms over social/institutional ones.

Figure 5.Comparison of complexityindex between expertsand students

30

25

26.8

18.817.1

15.612.2

Case study

10.3

3.6 3.4 3.1 1.7

24.8

Complexity index

20

15

10

5

0

KP

I-1

UP

C-3

UP

C-4

UP

C-2

UP

C-1

EU

T-2

EU

T-1

Exp

erts

DU

T-2

DU

T-1

CU

T-1

C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10 S

C1-environment 12 6 3 3 3 13 4 1 3 48C2-resources 2 2 0 3 12 3 0 3 25C3-social impact 13 3 8 13 2 3 7 49C4-values 1 6 5 3 14 10 39C5-future 3 1 0 2 0 6C6-unbalances 2 3 3 3 11C7-technology 8 15 13 36C8-economy 1 11 12C9-education 12 12C10-stakeholders 0S 12 8 18 7 23 51 23 39 62

Total 238

Table III.Inter-category linksof experts

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In relation to the pedagogy questionnaire, the following statements are interesting inthe context of this study:

. There is a need to change to system analysis thinking. Pedagogy must promotesystemic thinking among the students.

. Pedagogy has to shift from the predominance of a technology focus to a moresocietal focus, where the role of technology in society is considered.

. The basic shift is related to the teaching/learning attitudes instead of only tools.It is more a question of how we use the pedagogical methodologies than of themethodologies themselves. In that sense the attitudinal role of the teacher iscrucial.

. Pedagogy should include more multidisciplinary approaches like PBL becausesustainability cannot be achieved with a “narrow view”.

. Shift to active learning education with more practical project work. As a meansof moving from only theoretical thinkers towards change agents.

Experts propose a great number of pedagogical strategies (Figure 6). Measuring thepedagogical strategies and techniques statistically, the interviews show that about90 per cent of experts interviewed propose project-based learning as the most permeableactive learning strategy for the introduction of sustainability. Nevertheless, lecturing(71 per cent) is also seen as very important in the very first steps of the learning processeswhere information needs to be given to the students before they start applying thisknowledge in other active learning steps. All the activities proposed are related to activelearning (PBL, case studies, visits, role plays, etc.). All experts highlighted that morethan applying one specific methodology, a multi-pedagogy approach is appropriate inorder to reach all kinds of students and allow the acquisition of meta-cognitivecompetences related to SD.

Figure 6.Percentage of experts that

has highlighted theimportance of a

pedagogical strategy

Pedagogical strategies for SD

88%

71%

41%

32% 29%24% 21% 18% 15%

6% 6% 3% 3%0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

PB

L

Lect

urin

g

Cas

e st

udie

s

Tuto

rized

exer

cice

s

Dis

cusi

ons

and

deba

tes

Gue

st le

ctur

er

Vis

its

Stu

dent

lect

ures

Rol

e pl

ay

Mod

ellin

g

Bac

kcas

ting

Min

d m

aps

Por

tfolio

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ConclusionResults on the understanding of sustainability show that experts give more value to thesociological role in terms of how sustainability affects human-beings (social impact,unbalances, future) and how problems of unsustainability can be solved (values, educationand stakeholders). However, students possess a contrasting vision to that of the expertsbefore taking the SD courses; they see sustainability basically as a scientific-technologicalsubject in terms of the technological role to avoid and solve environmental problems. Thismismatching reveals that SD courses need to place more emphasis on thesocial/institutional side of sustainability.

The analysis of the SD competences in the cognitive domain showed that engineeringstudents should have both competences of systemic thinking and transdisciplinarity,upon graduating (Segalas et al., 2009). Therefore, more efforts should be placed on thepedagogy and the contents of the SD courses in order to ensure the acquisition of thesecompetences.

In order to achieve an effective education for SD, the reorientation of the pedagogyand the learning processes is a must; quoting the Barcelona Declaration (UPC, 2004)“teaching strategies in the classroom and teaching and learning techniques must bereviewed”. Also in this direction, experts are currently suggesting different schemesand actions to facilitate and promote this necessary pedagogical transformation inhigher education institutions and, specifically, in engineering education.

The literature review in chapter 3 showed that education is an important conditionbut does not guarantee change. In order to guarantee change, learning has to provide adeep knowledge of the basics of sustainability, and also has to build students’ capacityto absorb appropriate SD competences in relation to their future professional practice.

Several theories substantiate that sustainability needs systemic thinking (BarcelonaDeclaration, 2004; Sterling, 2004b; Stevens, 2008; Svanstrom et al., 2008). However, highereducation is still set up on a mechanistic model that divides understanding into separateboxes. According to the experts and practitioners interviewed, we need to create a newpedagogical approach that optimizes the understanding of the flows of relationshipsbetween all kinds of concepts. Sustainability is clearly a complex and systemic subject(which includes environment, society, economy, values, the future, culture, diversity,technology, etc.) and therefore, it needs transdisciplinary teaching/learning processes.Furthermore, these processes should also be active and cooperative. Also, it should not beforgotten that the process of teaching (“the role of the teacher”) is as important asthe content. Moreover, studies on learning reveal that students learn in different ways(Felder and Silverman, 1988; Felder et al., 2000; Honey and Mumford, 1992). Therefore, amulti-pedagogical active learning methodology is required in order to reach all students.

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About the authorsJordi Segalas works as Associate Professor at the Research Institute of Sustainability in theUniversitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Barcelona Tech). He is also the Vice-Dean for InternationalRelations and Sustainability at the School of Engineering of Vilanova i la Geltru and the Directorof the Catalan Network of Education for Sustainability. He obtained his PhD in EngineeringEducation in Sustainability from Barcelona Tech University and has been working in curriculumgreening policies and actions plans at the Barcelona Tech University since 2000. He has alsoworked in TEMPUS (trans-European cooperation scheme for higher education) projects relatedto sustainable development in higher education. He has published more than 30 articles abouthigher education and sustainability in different journals and conferences. Jordi Segalas is thecorresponding author and can be contacted at: jordi.segalas@upc.edu

Karel F. Mulder works as Associate Professor at the department of Technology, Policy& Management of Delft University of Technology, in the group Technology Dynamics andSustainable Development. He received an Engineering degree from Twente University, and aDoctorate in Business Administration from Groningen University in 1992. He was in charge of aproject to include Sustainable Development in all engineering curricula at Delft University ofTechnology from 1997 to 2005 and initiated the European Engineering Education in SustainableDevelopment network. He wrote Sustainable Development for Engineers, A Handbook andResource Guide (Greenleaf, Sheffield: isbn-10: 1-874719-19-5).

Dr Didac Ferrer-Balas graduated as an Industrial & Materials Engineer in 1997. His researchfocuses in the field of sustainabilty in higher education, and he has taught in the areas ofSustainable Organizations and Industrial Ecology. In 2000 he was appointed as the Coordinatorof the Environment Plan of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and in 2005 he becamethe Director of CITIES (Interdisciplinary Center of Technology, Innovation and Education forSustainability). From 2009 to 2011 he was the Technical Director of the UPC Institute ofSustainability (IS.UPC) at UPC.

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