Project introduction and background information
In the TU/e Strategy 2030, sustainability is identified as one of the three main challenges that TU/e aspires to address. In particular, the Strategy articulates university education ambitions like so: "Engineers in the future need a broad, open and cooperative mindset to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), contribute to the technological revolution and create impact for society in a responsible and sustainable way". In 2022, sustainability has been included in the revised TU/e Institutional Plan as one of the university's 17 goals.
One of the major outcomes of the work done in the first year of the project was the observation that most of the universities, including TU/e, make their assessment of sustainability based on self-reporting. If the teacher or a researcher actively links to the SDG or sustainability in a broad sense, then his/her research or course is considered linked to sustainability. TU/e however would like to go beyond that and explore whether it is possible to develop a framework which is not based on self-assessment, but which operates on a set of (objective) criteria.
It is also unclear if and how the SDGs can provide useful guiding principles for the assessment and organization of work on sustainability at, especially, technical universities. There is an increasing debate in the scientific and political circles about the use and utility of SDGs for that purpose. SDGs are often found to be difficult to operationalize and their description is contested, making it difficult to several technical disciplines to connect.
For TU/e, increasingly focused on challenges, and being located in the Brainport region with a high concentration of companies, such partnerships become more and more influential in its education. It is however important that the TU/ education and research stay neutral and objective.
In that view, the research question that the project focuses on is: What tools are necessary to integrate and evaluate sustainability in engineering education at TU/e and how can they be implemented?
Cover illustration by Helmich Jousma