Education Sciences, Vol. 16, Pages 144: Sustainable Development in an Engineering Degree: Teaching Actions

Education Sciences doi: 10.3390/educsci16010144

Authors:
Ana Romero Gutiérrez
Reyes García-Contreras
Raquel Fernández-Cézar
María Teresa Bejarano-Franco

Universities must prepare future professionals with critical thinking skills to effectively address complex social and environmental challenges. In engineering degrees, while technical competences are strongly developed, the acquisition of ethical and social skills remains challenging within the framework of traditional subjects. This paper explores how the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), following a competence-based educational model, can contribute to the development of ethical, social, and sustainability-related competences in an engineering degree. A set of activities, exercises, and tasks grounded in real professional contexts was designed to encourage students to explore sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems, supported by experiential learning and visible thinking routines. These activities were coherently aligned through interdisciplinary coordination among professors teaching in the degree. The results indicate that the proposed approach was positively received by both professors and students, who valued its contribution to personal and professional development. Students demonstrated enhanced critical thinking and greater awareness of the social and environmental implications of engineering decisions. This work aims to support and inspire educators seeking to integrate SDGs into their teaching by offering a feasible, transferable, and easy-to-implement framework for embedding ethical, social and sustainability-related competences in engineering teaching.

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