Teaching environmental sustainability in higher education

Abstract

The challenges of sustainable engineering and design are complex and so are the challenges of teaching sustainability to higher education students. This paper deals with teaching environmental sustainability, with a specific focus on the sustainability of buildings. The paper addresses specifically the higher professional and academic education. What do we know about the efficiency of courses on sustainability as they are currently offered and what do students need to experience in their curriculum to be able to appreciate the challenge of sustainable engineering? There always seem to be three major problems: (1) the definition of the concept of sustainable engineering, which is ill-defined and on which there is little general agreement, (2) the fact that sustainable engineering has to integrate many different disciplines, while curricula are mostly monodisciplinary, and (3) the fact that environmental sciences are still under development and suffer from progressive insights. This paper addresses these three stumbling blocks and bring them in relation with the basic principles of education and course design: How to deal with the ill-defined concept of sustainability in curricula? What are the implications of teaching a discipline that is still under rapid development? What are possible conflicts between multidisciplinary and monodisciplinary approaches of education in sustainability?