As people who put ideas into action, engineers play an important role in the world and in our society. They maintain our present and design our future and are central to the process of moving towards what has come to be called sustainability. A crucial aspect in this regard is education, as Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) prepares today’s students as the practitioners of tomorrow. Along with the growing complexity of what sustainability entails, so does the need to incorporate more of its aspects within the education of engineering students.
This paper takes a look at how different interpretations of sustainability influence the general trends within EESD and proposes an expansion towards incorporating more cultural aspects in EESD. This stems from the basic contention that Universities should teach engineering students the importance of social responsibility of their unique profession, a knowledge that expands from a traditional academic training.
This paper uses the concept of ‘hybrid imagination’ as a way of characterizing what a ‘culturally aware’ engineer can represent, and discusses a range of examples of how some Universities have tried to bring cultural and social aspects of sustainability into their curriculum. In doing so, it identifies the barriers which have kept such initiatives far from mainstream acceptance, but also growing interest in them.
It presents one such initiative that has been taken at Aalborg University in Denmark as part of the outreach phase of a research program on engineering education, Program of Research on Opportunities and Challenges in Engineering Education in Denmark (PROCEED)