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Staff and student ideals for sustainability in engineering education
Moorhouse, Claudia
Moorhouse, Claudia
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Date
2025
Educational Level
ISCED Level 5 Batchelor's or equivalent
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Geographical Setting
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Abstract
Uniquely placed to impact positive change, engineers have a responsibility to respond to the climate crisis. In turn, engineering educators have a responsibility to prepare graduates for this task. However, there is widespread appetite for change, evidenced by the skills-gap highlighted by industry, the dissatisfaction reported by many students, and feedback from teaching staff, who often report feeling burnt out. This research (which is ongoing) aims to support improvements in undergraduate engineering education by exploring the preferences and priorities the students and staff and highlighting keys areas of agreement - which may indicate 'low hanging fruit' - and of friction - which may need more careful navigation. A mixed methods approach was taken, focussing on staff and undergraduate students within the University of Bristol's Faculty of Engineering. A survey of 84 students revealed a wide range of responses regarding teaching quality, content relevance, and subjective experiences among undergraduates and suggested several predictors of satisfaction, including feeling that their courses are well aligned with their personal values, and that sustainability is well addressed. A round of 13 interviews then explored the experiences and opinions of students and staff in more depth, looking at what they imagined an 'ideal' engineering education would look like, and how sustainability would fit into it. Early analysis has looked at the pervasive idea that 'you can't please everyone'; disagreement around the extent to which resourcing is a limiting factor to improvements; and the widely held view that to embed sustainability would mean to reference the topic more, within existing curricula.
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Keywords (free text)
industry collaboration, survey evaluation, engineering education, engineering for sustainable development, education for sustainabilty, sustainability in engineering