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Organisational structures to drive sustainability integration in engineering education
Karvinen, Meeri Malkamäki, Marianna
Karvinen, Meeri
Malkamäki, Marianna
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Date
2025
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Abstract
The integration of sustainability into engineering education is essential for preparing future professionals to address global challenges, such as climate change and resource depletion. This implies that the university staff engaged in teaching can bring sustainability in the courses and curricula. In this endeavour, organisational support structures that would facilitate educators' integration efforts play a substantial, yet underexplored role in technical universities. We interviewed fourteen faculty staff members to examine the organisational actions taken and structures that the Nordic and Baltic technical universities have implemented to support the integration of sustainability in engineering curricula and courses. Further, we explored what visions the staff members have for accelerating the integration of sustainability into their university's education. The interview data was analysed using an abductive theme analysis, which allows for deductive and inductive forming of themes and subthemes. We found a variety of actions taken to promote sustainability integration. The processes that seem particularly beneficial for university-level integration included compulsory, university-wide sustainability courses, extensive programme reviews, and incentive processes, such as internal project funding for integration initiatives. Further, faculty staff emphasises the need for having more dedicated educators to promote the integration efforts, and to achieve this, commitment and resources from the leadership would be needed. Our findings provide a comprehensive overview of how organisational support structures can facilitate sustainability initiatives of the teaching staff. Therefore, this study can inform engineering educators and technical universities on how to further develop organisational support, thus contributing also to the wider discourse on systemic change in higher education.
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Keywords (free text)
engineering education, engineering for sustainable development, education for sustainabilty, sustainability in engineering