Integration of education for sustainable development in the mechanical engineering curriculum

This paper presents and analyses the integration with progression of educationfor sustainable development in Chalmers University of Technology’s MScEng programme inMechanical Engineering. The program has an aim and structure that emphasises employability,integration of general engineering skills, authentic engineering experiences with a focus on holisticview of the complete lifecycle of products and systems. The realisation of these aims stress the needof an integrated and adaptable sustainable development education for mechanical engineering. Toreach this goal, we applied a combined top-down and bottom-up education development processthat started with the formulation of program vision and program level learning outcomes. Facultymeetings and workshop were used to formulate the course learning outcomes and to map the programlevel outcomes to courses in which the outcomes are satisfi ed followed this. The strategy integratedspecifi c sustainability topics in courses where it is appropriate and to have a separate course insustainable development to ensure that general aspects of sustainable development are included andthat a team of faculty takes full responsibility for this. Design-build-test project courses are shownto be suitable arenas for integrating teaching and learning of sustainable development. Resultsfrom a student survey on perceptions of the relevance and quality of sustainability education arediscussed. Finally, continuing challenges in the area are identified