Lessons in Sustainability: Day of Sustainability in Education at TU Delft

In this new article format, we will take you along to the events of Studenten voor Morgen’s member organisations. We will write about the lessons we come across in sustainability. These are mostly related to education but can also be related to sustainability in general. In this week’s edition: the Day of Sustainability in Education at the University of Technology (TU) Delft.

On the 10th of October, it was the National Day of Sustainability in Education (DoSiE, DDHO in Dutch). On this day, and the period leading up to it, there were many events and ways of raising awareness for this day. For example, at the University of Groningen, the whole week was turned into sustainability week and loaded with multiple events a day. And at the University of Leiden, they celebrated with a more informal book and clothing swap on the day itself. However, the event that showed us lessons in sustainability in education was the Sustainability Award event at TU Delft.

During this event, the GreenTU team organised an award presentation for educational staff that, according to their students, deserved an award for their efforts in teaching about sustainability. Moreover, the winners of these prizes, then, participated in an interesting panel discussion on sustainability in education. To end the plenary session, there was an insightful talk by a researcher on education for sustainability. The final drinks were also proven to be a fruitful place for new connections for education on sustainability.

Lessons from teachers

The eight lecturers, assistant professors, and educational support staff were nominated for various reasons. For example, this could have to do with being involved in projects that encourage interdisciplinary collaboration on sustainability or organising excursions to a solar panel company. During the panel discussion, it became apparent that their efforts for sustainable education went beyond these reasons and the most inspiring lessons we could draw from that were the following.

Highlighted, by Fatima Delgado Medina, a Sustainable and Circular Entrepreneurship lecturer, is that there should be a focus on Indigenous knowledge when lecturing on sustainability. Moreover, removing the academic distance from this knowledge was something that she supported. The societal/social part of sustainability, especially in regard to the Global South, is another aspect of teaching sustainability that Fatima finds important.

Menno Broers, a Sustainability Coordinator and Climate Coach, fosters collaboration and coordination within the faculty. He emphasized the need for taking small steps as switching to education on sustainability is too big of a step to take all at once. This is, according to him, because you first need to have those on board who already have an interest in sustainability. He refers to this group as the early adopters, a term from the Diffusion of Innovation Theory by Rogers (1962), and accordingly, we should try to get more followers and then the early majority will become interested.

Jeremy Faludi, Assistant Professor of Sustainable Design Engineering, started off by saying how happy he is he is teaching in the Netherlands, as education on sustainability is very developed here. He inspires his students with this happiness to make their personal practices sustainable too. For example, he encourages reusing and recycling of materials that they use in design projects for new projects.

Tom Burdyny, Assistant Professor of Performance and Scalability of Electrochemical Technologies, highlighted the importance of preparing engineering students for the sustainability aspects of their future. His way of doing this is by lecturing about the 3 scopes of emissions. As this is used to measure companies’ impact it is important for all engineers, no matter what sector they will end up in, according to Tom.

Lastly, the importance of a community, of educational staff that focus on sustainability, to share knowledge on education on sustainability is shared between the winners. When it comes to making education on sustainability mandatory it was supported by all winners that sustainability should be a part of the curriculum but that it should also be a part of elective courses.

Lessons for the lessons

For discussing the actual lessons on sustainability, that the students of TU Delft encounter, Monika Roeling was invited to speak. She is a researcher in sustainability in education who co-wrote a paper on the implementation of sustainability in engineering education. For this, they created a specific TU Delft Framework, based on the Engineering for One Planet Framework, which was cross-referenced with engineering accreditation requirements and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Lastly, disciplinary competencies were added to the model.

This framework was tested in the context of the renewal of the Bachelor of Science in Architecture of the TU Delft. Firstly, an inventory of keywords and SDGs in existing course descriptions and learning objectives was made. Then, top-down, the curriculum was redesigned based on the preliminary framework. Next, bottom-up, all courses were related to the SDGs. Lastly, the courses were further researched on their learning objectives, activities and assessments.

This method, thus, provides guidelines on how to integrate sustainability into engineering degrees. It is, of course, always in development, and the researcher already emphasised looking at including sustainable competences into the framework. However, it does ensure studyability for students and teachability for the lecturers as it does not make the curriculum broader or more demanding.

Became interested in learning more about this interesting research? Read MaartenJan Hoekstra, Monika Roeling, Wing Yung and Leo van den Burg’s paper here.

To conclude, this event has taught us how to implement more sustainability perspectives in engineering degrees. Moreover, it showed that the positive teachers’ drivers for sustainable education vary but are greatly appreciated by their students and are necessary to continue sustainable education.