Assessing sustainability knowledge: A framework of concepts

Although engineering professional societies and other governing bodies emphasize the necessity of sustainability in engineering education, these principles have proven difficult to integrate into existing engineering curricula. This paper describes activities designed to generate a framework of concepts engineering faculty members not familiar with sustainability can use to incorporate sustainability into their mid-level undergraduate courses. The research team conducted a variety of qualitative studies, including reviewing course descriptions related to sustainability, coding literature that talked about sustainability in engineering education, talking with undergraduate students about what they thought sustainability is, and learning from sustainability education experts through an online conversation and face- To-face workshop. The paper focuses on the final of these approaches, and describes the experiences and conclusions of working with sustainability education experts to formulate the framework of critical sustainability concepts. We propose the framework itself for discussion, and offer some final insights to consider for future work.