Structuring Sustainability Education: The Canadian Engineering Landscape

Abstract

Across all disciplines and fields, engineers today are faced with critical socio-environmental challenges. Sustainability education is essential to prepare graduates with the skills required to navigate and balance the complex social, environmental, technical and economic considerations that these problems involve. While prior research has proposed pedagogical frameworks and strategies for integrating sustainability into engineering curricula, fewer studies empirically compare how these approaches are enacted at scale. We address this gap by mapping the landscape of sustainability education across English-language Canadian engineering programs. We analyze three interrelated dimensions of sustainability integration: the framing of the engineer’s professional role (particularly with respect to sustainability) within program descriptions, integration of sustainability across program-level curricula, and sustainability content articulated in course descriptions. Our findings reveal existing misalignments in sustainability curricula, highlighting both opportunities and challenges for more meaningful sustainability education. We discuss the implications for engineering educators and institutions seeking to strengthen students’ sustainability literacy, and develop more coherent sustainability curricula.