SusCo – Interdisciplinarity for Sustainable Competences in Engineering Education

The mission of the EELISA SusCo Community is to support sustainability and transversal skill development for the new European Engineer by enhancing interdisciplinary education in the engineering curricula. We will design joint research activites - both qualitative and quantitative research projects about sustainable skill development through interdisciplinarity. We are looking for good local practices, ideas, pilots on the implementation of sustainable skills development in the engineering curricula.

Our goals: (what do we want to achieve?)

The short-term goals of the EELISA SusCo Community are to identify sustainable competences and transversal skills engineers need to face today’s global challenges related to sustainability and to find ways to support the development of these competences through curricula improvement, utilizing innovative pedagogical methods and other good practices using interdisciplinarity methods in education. 

Our mid-term goals are to collect national and international good practices on how to support the necessary non-technical skillset development for engineers to face sustainability issues and examine how interdisciplinary education could help and be integrated in engineering education. We aim to influence the behaviour of as many colleagues and students as possible through our planned research activities: focus group discussions, workshops, surveys, etc.  We will develop a set of recommendations for EELISA Universities to better integrate sustainability and transversal skills into their agenda.

Our motivation: (why are we doing this?)

Engineers are key contributors to the efforts to achieve the Sustainability Development Goals set up by the Agenda 2030. The complex sustainability challenges require complex and non-traditional solutions, and an interdisciplinarity approach could facilitate and support the development of potential solutions. Interdisciplinarity as a tool of sustainable education can equip future engineers the necessary sustainability and transversal skillset to successfully face the global sustainability challenges. 

How to participate: (how will we achieve our goal? How can you be a part of this community?)

We are going to delve into research, discussion, and knowledge exchange with our members from the partner institutions and recruited students to share good practices and design new ones for our communities.  Please reach out to orsolya.barna@gtk.bme.hu in case you would like to join!