Active learning based sustainability education: a case study

Abstract

The fundamental role of engineering in modern societies demands not only technically specialized engineers, but also global cultural cognizance, personal and professional ethics, together with sound transversal skills and responsiveness for sustainability issues. An enriching learning context provides engineering students with opportunities to proactively seek knowledge and technical proficiency at their unique pace, and monitor and master their own learning process. Active Learning undoubtedly enables an enriching learning context, where technical and transversal competences can be widely exercised and developed. However, when looking at the development of sustainability competences within engineering degrees, they can be: (1) straightly patterned into the curricula; (2) loosely coupled or arbitrarily schedule amongst a number of degree courses; or (3) essentially absent. This paper provides an analysis on the development of sustainability competences in the Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) programme of the University of Minho, Portugal. Supported by student report content analysis, this paper explores the widely documented IEM interdisciplinary Project-Based Learning (PBL) methodology, at University of Minho, which has been applied over a long timeframe, and denotes, at least to a certain extent, to be a suitable learning methodology for the development of technical and transversal competences for the envisaged professional profile. Fink’s Taxonomy was used in the discussion and reflection of the reports results relating to the sustainability issue.