Blueprints for Teaching Ecodesign and Sustainability to University Students

Abstract

There can be little doubt that if ecodesign and sustainability principles are going to be adopted, a great accelerator would be fundamental curriculum reform in engineering degree-granting institutions across the globe. But for most individuals involved with institutions of higher education, daunting hurdles exist at all levels – departmental, college, university, as well as accreditation by certification agencies. And because of the work burdens extant in academic jobs, most individual faculty members do not have the time to jump through the procedural hoops that would result in real change. Additionally, because of the lack of widespread acceptance of the basic principles of product life cycle management, or the need to take valuable real estate from other topics, most efforts in curricular change end up bogged down. There are a rapidly increasing number of programs that offer some complement of sustainability courses at the graduate level, and some nascent efforts at the undergraduate level. However, the largest problem with single-course offerings is that they effectively pigeonhole “green” engineering into a vanishingly small part of the curriculum, where what really needs to happen is a systemic overhaul of all classes so that ecodesign and sustainability become systemic in the way that engineers operate themselves.

But in order for this to happen, some type of framework must be established that allows both students and professors a larger, more coherent approach to the field. Such a model is presented in this chapter. This approach is both inclusive and extensive. After presentation of the model, this chapter offers the educational practitioner some examples of application of the model – one is a model for curriculum reform primarily at the undergraduate level, with examples for potential from the USA, Europe, and India. The other is a template for two more typical sustainability courses that would be offered at the graduate level.