No Time To Waste

Abstract

There are many ways of integrating sustainability into engineering education. While renewing the Bachelor’s Programme in Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences at TU Delft, The Netherlands, we discovered that these ways can easily lead to a stalemate: while there is the forward thrust of a curriculum renewal with its strict deadlines, uncertainty about useable concepts to integrate sustainability can cause delays and the avoidance of fundamental decisions. In this practice paper we give a brief overview of the ways to integrate sustainability we have considered, and explain how we subsequently chose what to do first and why. After an inventory of UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the current courses, we reasoned that our faculty themes on sustainability were not directive enough, and that sustainability frameworks were not fully developed yet. Therefore we adopted a twofold method, top-down and bottom-up: redesigning the curriculum based on a preliminary framework, and connecting it with the SDGs in all 24 courses. This new combination did not provide a 'finished' sustainable curriculum, but does allow for follow-up steps that will update it based on fully developed frameworks and sustainable competences in the learning objectives. Our conclusion is that any method of integration may work, but that change can only start by choosing a method and going with it. Our advice is therefore nothing less than a plea for a cultural shift: to break the stalemate by choosing any way of implementing sustainability as soon as possible, in order to gradually transform education as sustainability.