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www.emeraldinsight.com/1467-6370.htm

What do
What do EESD “experts” think “experts” think
sustainability is? Which pedagogy sustainability is?
is suitable to learn it?
293
Results from interviews and Cmaps analysis
gathered at EESD 2008 Received 27 April 2011
Revised 18 September 2011
Jordi Segalàs Accepted 10 February 2012

School of Engineering of Vilanova i la Geltrú,

Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech, Barcelona, Spain
Karel F. Mulder
Technology Dynamics and Sustainable Development,
Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, and
Didac Ferrer-Balas
Institute of Sustainability,
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech, Barcelona, Spain

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study how experts on teaching sustainability in
engineering education contextualize sustainability; also to evaluate the understanding of
sustainability by engineering students. The final aim is to evaluate what pedagogy experts believe
provides better opportunities for learning about sustainability in engineering education.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors used conceptual maps (cmaps) analysis with
two taxonomies of four and ten categories. The first taxonomy clusters the significance of sustainability
in environmental, technological, social and institutional aspects and shows the main trends; the second (of ten
categories) divides the previous categories into greater detail. To evaluate the experts’ cmaps two indices
were defined that provide information about what experts think sustainability is most related to and evaluate
how complex they see the sustainability concept. In total, 500 students from five European engineering
universities were then surveyed and the results compared with those of the experts. Finally, interviews were
held with experts to try to determine the best pedagogy to apply to achieve learning around sustainability.
Findings – The results show that Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) experts
consider that institutional and social aspects are more relevant to sustainability than environmental and
technological ones. The results were compared with the understanding of sustainability by a sample of
more than 500 engineering students who had taken courses on sustainability at five technical universities
in Europe. This comparison shows a mismatch among the EESD “experts’” and the students’
understanding of sustainability, which suggest that sustainability courses in engineering degrees should
emphasise the social and institutional aspects versus environmental and technological ones. Moreover,
courses should emphasize more the complexity of sustainability.
Originality/value – The paper emphasizes the lack of priority that social and institutional aspects
are given in sustainability courses and promotes a discussion about how these two elements and
complex thinking can increase their importance in the engineering curriculum. International Journal of Sustainability
in Higher Education
Keywords Europe, Universities, Curricula, Engineering education, Sustainability, Vol. 13 No. 3, 2012
Sustainable development, Learning assessment, Experts, Students, Conceptual maps, Pedagogy pp. 293-304
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Paper type Research paper 1467-6370
DOI 10.1108/14676371211242599
IJSHE Introduction
13,3 Education for sustainable development (ESD) has been on the agenda of many
engineering faculties since the late 1990s. Many approaches have been developed to
produce well-trained graduate engineers with the knowledge, abilities, values and
attitudes needed to contribute to SD. However, what SD competences should
engineering students obtain at university? Some studies (Segalàs et al., 2009;
294 Svanström et al., 2008) reveal that these competences are mainly related to critical
thinking, systemic thinking, the ability to work within transdisciplinary frameworks
and to develop values consistent with the sustainability paradigm.
The next question is how to teach/learn these competences. Which pedagogical
strategies are more suitable to learn key SD competences? What kind of education is
needed? In relation to SD, so far, there is no direct relation between educated societies
(i.e. those with the highest proportion of “educated” citizens) and societies with the
“highest” levels of sustainability. Quoting Schumacher (1973):
The volume of education [. . .] continues to increase, yet so do pollution, exhaustion of resources,
and the dangers of ecological catastrophe. If still more education is to save us, it would have to be
education of a different kind: an education that takes us into the depth of things.
Sustainability demands a specific kind of learning. Some authors call for a deep change
in society to achieve a sustainable society. “Sustainable Development is not just a
matter or acquiring some extra knowledge. Attitude is also important. Moreover, it is
often necessary to change social structures” (Mulder, 2006).
When analyzing pedagogical methodologies and their suitability to teaching/learning
SD in engineering universities, the state of the art (Azapagic et al., 2004; Barcelona
Declaration, 2004; Canadell, 2006; Van Dam-Mieras, 2006; Dawe, 2005; Eagan et al., 2002;
Harpet, 2006; Holmberg and Samuelsson, 2006; Segalas et al., 2007; Sterling, 2004a, b;
Yuan, 2001) shows that there is consensus about the need to move from a
mechanistic/traditional way of teaching to an ecological/alternative one in order to
allow engineering students to achieve SD competences in both cognitive (knowledge and
understanding) and meta-cognitive (skills and abilities and attitudes) domains.
A conclusion of the analyses is that the approaches have high commonalities. Most
of the competences are related:
.
Critical thinking is regularly mentioned explicitly and implicitly in sets of
competences. The mental processes of discernment, analysis and evaluation
from an open-minded point of view are often highlighted.
.
Systemic thinking is any process of estimating or inferring how local policies,
actions, or changes influence the state of the broader universe. It is an approach to
problem solving that views “problems” as parts of an overall system, rather than
reacting to present outcomes or events and potentially contributing to further
development of the undesired issue or problem (O’Connor and McDermott, 1997).
.
Inter-trans-disciplinarity is also important for SD, taking into account both the
participation of different professionals to solve problems and the involvement of
stakeholders in processes that are seen as experts’ jobs.
.
Values and ethics are at the core of the meta-cognitive sets of competences. They
are shown as the main force to change personal and professional attitudes for SD
engagement.
During the international conference on Engineering Education in SD held at the What do
Graz University of Technology in October 2008, a workshop was carried out where “experts” think
participants were asked to give their opinion about which pedagogy is better to learn
sustainability at engineering universities. Moreover, in a plenary session, the experts sustainability is?
participating in the conference were asked to draw a conceptual map which answers to
the focus question: what is sustainability? The results of the conceptual map analysis
allowed to evaluate quantitatively the understanding of sustainability by the experts 295
which reinforced the results of this research.

Methodology
The evaluation of the experts understanding of sustainability was made using
conceptual maps (Cmaps) (Lourdel et al., 2007; Novak, 1998; Novak and Cañas, 2008;
Segalàs et al., 2008). In this study, the Cmap method was used with the lowest degree
of directness (Ruiz-Primo, 2004), and no concept, linking line, linking phrase or Cmap
structure was provided to experts. The following assessment components were
considered in the analysis of the Cmaps: the number of concepts, the relevance of
concepts, the number of links between concepts that belong to different categories and
the complexity of the Cmap.
To analyse the concepts within the CMaps, four main categories were used,
along with a total of ten sub-categories, as shown in Table I.
Two indices were defined in order to evaluate the Cmaps (Segalàs et al., 2010):
(1) Category relevance index (CR). This provides information about what students
think sustainability is most closely related to. It is evaluated using two
indicators:
.
Concept distribution among categories (CD). This evaluates the distribution
of concepts among categories, measured as the percentage of concepts
devoted to a certain category:

Taxonomy
Four
categories Ten categories Concepts and aspects considered

Environmental Environment Pollution, degradation, conservation, biodiversity, ecological

footprint, etc.
Resource scarcity Non-renewable resources, depletion of materials, etc.
Social Social impact Quality of life, health, risk management, etc.
Values Ethics, respect for traditions and cultures, etc.
Future (temporal) Future generations, scenario analysis, forecasting, backcasting,
etc.
Unbalances The equity dimension, north-south cooperation, fair distribution
(spatial) of goods, fair use of resources, etc.
Economic Technology Best available technologies, industry, efficiency, clean
technologies, energy, impact of technology, etc.
Economy Role of economy, fair trade, consumption patterns, etc.
Institutional Education Role of education, rise of awareness, education institutions,
media’s role in education or disinformation, etc. Table I.
Actors and Role of governments, NGOs, rules, laws, international Taxonomy of sustainable
stakeholders agreements, individuals and societal stakeholders, etc. development categories
IJSHE NC i
CDi ¼ Pi¼NCa ð1Þ
13,3 i¼1 NC i
where:
i is the category analysed.
NCi is the number of concepts per student per category.
296
NCa is the number of categories.
. The percentage of experts who assign concepts to a certain category (SC).
Measured as:
NS i
SC i ¼ ð2Þ
NS
where:
NS is the sample number of students who participate in the observation
NSi is the number of students that assign concepts to a specific category (NSi)
The category relevance is calculated by multiplying the two indicators:

CDi £ SC i
CRi ¼ Pi¼NCa ð3Þ
i¼1 CDi £ SC i

(2) Complexity index (CO). This evaluates how developed and interconnected the
experts find the concepts they have related to sustainability, that is, the
complexity of their understanding of sustainability. Two indicators were
multiplied to obtain this value:

CO ¼ NC £ LCa ð4Þ

.
Average number of concepts per student (NC).
.
Relative measure of the connections between concepts that belong to
different categories (LCa). This indicator normalises the number of
categories and the number of experts, dividing the inter-category links by
the number of categories and the number of experts in the sample. It is
calculated as follows:
Pj¼NS
j¼1 NLj
LCa ¼ ð5Þ
N Ca £ NS

where: NL – is the number of inter-category links between concepts that

belong to different categories (NL). The links to the sustainability concept are
not considered.
The complexity index can vary from zero to any value, depending on the number of
concepts and the inter-category links. Figure 1 shows the complexity increase from a
 B12 D3
D2 D3
What do
B2

B11 b
d
d B2
b2
“experts” think
b1 b d

b1 B
D b sustainability is?
b d D
B b
B1 a
a D1 d
a
a D1

C1 a
A

a
c
A
d
297
c
a a
C E d3
b2
c1 c C e E
c1 e
c E2 e
e
e1 c E2
C2 c3
c c
C3 E1 c e2
c33
C3
c3 c3
c3 c3 c3
c2
C31
c32
C33
C31
Figure 1.
C33
C32
Example of increase in
complexity in Cmaps due
(a) (b) to increase of links
inter-categories
Notes: (a) Low complexity (CO = 0); (b) high complexity (CO >> 0)

branched Cmap (a) where there are no link inter-categories, where it can be seen that
the links between the same category concepts do not count as a link, to a more complex
Cmap (b) where there are fewer concepts but the categories are interlinked (links
inter-categories are in red).
The complexity results shown in this work were obtained using the four-category
taxonomy.
The results of the experts Cmaps analysis were compared with a sample of ten case
studies of specific sustainability courses offered in five European technological
universities, in which more than 500 students participated (Table II). Universities that

Code University Course ECTS Sample

UPC-1 Barcelona Tech – UPC Technology and sustainability 5 226

UPC-2 Barcelona Tech – UPC Technology and sustainability 5 43
UPC-3 Barcelona Tech – UPC Technology and environment 5 31
UPC-4 Barcelona Tech – UPC International seminar on sustainable 5 19
technology
DUT-1 Delft University of Technology Energy III 8 (0.7) 26
DUT-2 Delft University of Technology Societal aspects of information 4
technology 45
CUT-1 Chalmers University of Global chemical sustainability 7 53
Technology
KPI-1 Kiev Polytechnic Institute Sustainable development 3 17
EUT-1 Eindhoven University of Technology and sustainability 3 28
Technology Table II.
EUT-2 Eindhoven University of Technology and sustainability 3 18 Sample of courses
Technology analysed
IJSHE represented different regions of Europe were selected (north, south, east and west).
13,3 Courses were mainly selected on the basis of the willingness of the course coordinators
to participate in the research.
The previous results allowed the study of the experts understanding of sustainability.
Next step was to evaluate what experts propose as the most appropriate pedagogical
methodologies to train engineering students in sustainability. For that purpose experts
298 were asked: “Which are the shift and the required transformation in the pedagogy used in
Engineering Education Institutions to train engineers to become change agents for
sustainability?” and “Which pedagogical approaches do you think that are more
appropriate to learn sustainability competences?”.

Results and discussion

When analysing the conceptualization of sustainability by experts through the two
indicators the results are.

Category relevance
The analysis of the experts’ Cmaps is shown in Figures 2 and 3.
Figure 2 shows the results of the concepts distribution (CDi), the percentage of experts
who assign concepts to a certain category (SCi) and the category relevance index (CRi).
It shows that they relate sustainability mainly to social (30 per cent) and institutional
(32 per cent) aspects and less to technological (21 per cent) and environmental (16 per cent)
ones.
Figure 3 clusters the results in two areas: scientific/technological and
social/institutional. It points up that experts give more value to the sociological role in
terms of how sustainability affects human-beings (social impact, unbalances, future) and
how problems relating to unsustainability can be solved (values, education and
stakeholders).
Students’ results show (Figure 4) that their conceptions before taking the SD courses
contrast with those of the experts. Instead, they understand sustainability basically as a
technological (46 per cent) and environmental (34 per cent) issue and they hardly relate

Category Relevance Analysis

100% 95% 95% 95%

89%
80%

60%

40% 29% 30% 32% 32%

17% 21% 21%
20% 16%

0%
Enviornmental Social Economic Institutional
& Technological
Cateory
Figure 2.
Category relevance of Concepts distribution (CDi) Experts distribution (SCi) Category relevance (CRi)
experts’ Cmaps
Note: Four categories taxonomy
50% What do
“experts” think
40% Sociological role
sustainability is?
30%
Scientific/technological role Unbalances
Future
Stake
holders
299
20%
Economy
Values
Resources
10%
Technology
Environment Education
Social impact
0%
Environmental Technological/ Social Institutional Figure 3.
Economic Category relevance
of experts’ Cmaps
Note: Ten categories taxonomy

Scientific/technological role
50%
Before Before
Economy

After
40%
Economy
Resources
After
30%
Resources
Sociological role
Technology
20%
After
Technology
Figure 4.
Environment
Environment
Before After Students
10% Unbalances Before Stakeholders
Unbalances
Future
Future category-relevance index
Values Stakeholders
Values
values: Cmap1 (before)
Social impact Social impact Education
0%
Education
and Cmap2 (after)
Enviornmental Technological/Economic Social Institutional

it to social (8 per cent) or institutional (9 per cent) aspects. The results after taking the
courses are not much different: technological (40 per cent), environmental (31 per cent),
institutional (16 per cent) and social (11 per cent). This reveals that students see
sustainability basically as a scientific-technological subject whereby technological
measures are applied to avoid and solve environmental problems.

Complexity index
Table III shows the inter-category links using the ten category taxonomy. The analysis
of the partial number of inter-category links shows that the category most linked is
Stakeholders (62), followed by technology (51), social impact (49) and environment (48).
Relative inter-category links (equation (5)):
Pj¼NS
j¼1 NLj 238
LCa ¼ ¼ ¼ 1:25
N Ca £ NS 10 £ 19
IJSHE
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10 S
13,3
C1-environment 12 6 3 3 3 13 4 1 3 48
C2-resources 2 2 0 3 12 3 0 3 25
C3-social impact 13 3 8 13 2 3 7 49
C4-values 1 6 5 3 14 10 39
300 C5-future 3 1 0 2 0 6
C6-unbalances 2 3 3 3 11
C7-technology 8 15 13 36
C8-economy 1 11 12
C9-education 12 12
Table III. C10-stakeholders 0
Inter-category links S 12 8 18 7 23 51 23 39 62
of experts Total 238

Applying equation (4) the complexity index by experts is:

CO ¼ NC £ LCa ¼ 24:80
Figure 5 compares the expert complexity index to the results obtained by students. The
value of the students’ complexity index was very low in most case studies. These low
results might be explained by two reasons. The first one is that students perceive that
sustainability is not very related to social and institutional aspects, and therefore they
hardly included concepts in these areas. Another reason is that they barely see
sustainability as a complex issue, so they mainly linked intra-category concepts and
included few inter-category links. These results may be explained by the lack of SD
understanding by students in terms of systemic thinking (inter-links) and
transdisciplinarity (no social and institutional concepts). The lack of social/institutional
thinking versus the scientific/technological role of SD may not be surprising given – the
nature of the programmes the students are taking (i.e. explicitly eng/technological
programmes) – the names of the modules themselves (most of the modules considered
have the word “technology” in them). This is perhaps priming students so that they frame
sustainability in scientific/technological terms over social/institutional ones.

Complexity index
30 26.8
24.8
25
20 18.8
17.1
15.6
15 12.2
10.3
10
5 3.6 3.4 3.1 1.7
Figure 5. 0
Comparison of complexity
I-1

T-1

T-2

T-2

T-1

T-1

r ts
C-

C-

C-

C-
KP

pe

index between experts

CU

EU

DU

DU

EU
UP

UP

UP

UP

Ex

and students
Case study
In relation to the pedagogy questionnaire, the following statements are interesting in What do
the context of this study: “experts” think
.
There is a need to change to system analysis thinking. Pedagogy must promote sustainability is?
systemic thinking among the students.
.
Pedagogy has to shift from the predominance of a technology focus to a more
societal focus, where the role of technology in society is considered.
301
.
The basic shift is related to the teaching/learning attitudes instead of only tools.
It is more a question of how we use the pedagogical methodologies than of the
methodologies themselves. In that sense the attitudinal role of the teacher is
crucial.
.
Pedagogy should include more multidisciplinary approaches like PBL because
sustainability cannot be achieved with a “narrow view”.
.
Shift to active learning education with more practical project work. As a means
of moving from only theoretical thinkers towards change agents.

Experts propose a great number of pedagogical strategies (Figure 6). Measuring the
pedagogical strategies and techniques statistically, the interviews show that about
90 per cent of experts interviewed propose project-based learning as the most permeable
active learning strategy for the introduction of sustainability. Nevertheless, lecturing
(71 per cent) is also seen as very important in the very first steps of the learning processes
where information needs to be given to the students before they start applying this
knowledge in other active learning steps. All the activities proposed are related to active
learning (PBL, case studies, visits, role plays, etc.). All experts highlighted that more
than applying one specific methodology, a multi-pedagogy approach is appropriate in
order to reach all kinds of students and allow the acquisition of meta-cognitive
competences related to SD.

Pedagogical strategies for SD

100%
88%

80%
71%

60%

41%
40% 32% 29%
24% 21%
20% 18%
15%
6% 6% 3% 3%
0%
PBL

Lecturing

Case studies

Tutorized
exercices
Discusions and
debates

Guest lecturer

Visits

Student
lectures

Role play

Modelling

Backcasting

Mind maps

Portfolio

Figure 6.
Percentage of experts that
has highlighted the
importance of a
pedagogical strategy
IJSHE Conclusion
13,3 Results on the understanding of sustainability show that experts give more value to the
sociological role in terms of how sustainability affects human-beings (social impact,
unbalances, future) and how problems of unsustainability can be solved (values, education
and stakeholders). However, students possess a contrasting vision to that of the experts
before taking the SD courses; they see sustainability basically as a scientific-technological
302 subject in terms of the technological role to avoid and solve environmental problems. This
mismatching reveals that SD courses need to place more emphasis on the
social/institutional side of sustainability.
The analysis of the SD competences in the cognitive domain showed that engineering
students should have both competences of systemic thinking and transdisciplinarity,
upon graduating (Segalàs et al., 2009). Therefore, more efforts should be placed on the
pedagogy and the contents of the SD courses in order to ensure the acquisition of these
competences.
In order to achieve an effective education for SD, the reorientation of the pedagogy
and the learning processes is a must; quoting the Barcelona Declaration (UPC, 2004)
“teaching strategies in the classroom and teaching and learning techniques must be
reviewed”. Also in this direction, experts are currently suggesting different schemes
and actions to facilitate and promote this necessary pedagogical transformation in
higher education institutions and, specifically, in engineering education.
The literature review in chapter 3 showed that education is an important condition
but does not guarantee change. In order to guarantee change, learning has to provide a
deep knowledge of the basics of sustainability, and also has to build students’ capacity
to absorb appropriate SD competences in relation to their future professional practice.
Several theories substantiate that sustainability needs systemic thinking (Barcelona
Declaration, 2004; Sterling, 2004b; Stevens, 2008; Svanström et al., 2008). However, higher
education is still set up on a mechanistic model that divides understanding into separate
boxes. According to the experts and practitioners interviewed, we need to create a new
pedagogical approach that optimizes the understanding of the flows of relationships
between all kinds of concepts. Sustainability is clearly a complex and systemic subject
(which includes environment, society, economy, values, the future, culture, diversity,
technology, etc.) and therefore, it needs transdisciplinary teaching/learning processes.
Furthermore, these processes should also be active and cooperative. Also, it should not be
forgotten that the process of teaching (“the role of the teacher”) is as important as
the content. Moreover, studies on learning reveal that students learn in different ways
(Felder and Silverman, 1988; Felder et al., 2000; Honey and Mumford, 1992). Therefore, a
multi-pedagogical active learning methodology is required in order to reach all students.

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About the authors

Jordi Segalàs works as Associate Professor at the Research Institute of Sustainability in the
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Barcelona Tech). He is also the Vice-Dean for International
Relations and Sustainability at the School of Engineering of Vilanova i la Geltrú and the Director
of the Catalan Network of Education for Sustainability. He obtained his PhD in Engineering
Education in Sustainability from Barcelona Tech University and has been working in curriculum
greening policies and actions plans at the Barcelona Tech University since 2000. He has also
worked in TEMPUS (trans-European cooperation scheme for higher education) projects related
to sustainable development in higher education. He has published more than 30 articles about
higher education and sustainability in different journals and conferences. Jordi Segalàs is the
corresponding author and can be contacted at: jordi.segalas@upc.edu
Karel F. Mulder works as Associate Professor at the department of Technology, Policy
& Management of Delft University of Technology, in the group Technology Dynamics and
Sustainable Development. He received an Engineering degree from Twente University, and a
Doctorate in Business Administration from Groningen University in 1992. He was in charge of a
project to include Sustainable Development in all engineering curricula at Delft University of
Technology from 1997 to 2005 and initiated the European Engineering Education in Sustainable
Development network. He wrote Sustainable Development for Engineers, A Handbook and
Resource Guide (Greenleaf, Sheffield: isbn-10: 1-874719-19-5).
Dr Didac Ferrer-Balas graduated as an Industrial & Materials Engineer in 1997. His research
focuses in the field of sustainabilty in higher education, and he has taught in the areas of
Sustainable Organizations and Industrial Ecology. In 2000 he was appointed as the Coordinator
of the Environment Plan of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) and in 2005 he became
the Director of CITIES (Interdisciplinary Center of Technology, Innovation and Education for
Sustainability). From 2009 to 2011 he was the Technical Director of the UPC Institute of
Sustainability (IS.UPC) at UPC.

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