The impact of teaching engineering for sustainability on students : A comparative study on different levels of sustainability integration in University of Technology
Résumé
Sustainability is currently integrated into engineering curricula. There are different ways of
understanding sustainability and different ways of integrating it into engineering education. The aim of
this paper is to better understand the impact of sustainable engineering education on students. In
particular, we assess the impact of sustainability education on the evolution of students’ sustainability
engineering competencies. We conducted a comparative study with three classes that integrate
sustainability differently in their curriculum in French universities of technology. The main results
concern 4 competencies: critical thinking, problem solving, systemic thinking, and normative
competence. One of the results of this study is that analyzing the environmental impact of a technical
object in an educational context improves engineering competencies for sustainability, whether that
environmental analysis is qualitative or quantitative.