An Exploratory Study on the Contextual Challenges and Barriers of Introducing Sustainability to First-Year Engineering Students

Sustainability has become increasingly significant for the engineering profession with reference made to it in a variety of professional engineering standards. Sustainability, while not enough at times, requires both engineers and citizens, to consider the breadth and depth the impact of our own lives in tandem with the products and services engineers design globally. The success in integrating novel sustainability concepts in existing curricula relies upon three main components of an individual’s context: perceptions, awareness and knowledge. To effectively convey those concepts, Faculty needs to become aware of the current state, including potential barriers and enablers, present in the first year students’ context. Given the baseline identified through an initial effort of curricula redesign, Faculty needs to engage in a reinforcing process where one or several of these three components are sequentially and/or concurrently impacted. In general, individuals, and first year students in particular, function in very distinctive contexts. They achieve a level of awareness regarding a concept based on a continuous exchange of information within their contexts. Moreover, they perceive a concept through the happening (or not happening) of contextual events and they acquire knowledge either by choice or by need. The challenge of curricula redesign relies upon the infusion of knowledge that should be aligned with the individual’s context: perception and awareness. This alignment occurs through several interactions between those three components. Initial experiences with sustainability education engaging students through demonstration of both local and global impacts of their behavior, partnered with the use of social media, are important to enhance students’ positive perception toward sustainability. Moreover, this engagement also increases the students’ willingness to incorporate sustainability into their future courses, particularly when solving real design problems in their workplace. The additional sustainability module enables first-year engineering students at both universities to understand the concept of sustainability and its relationship with the engineering design process as it is applied to solve real-world problems.