Presentation Information
[U14-P06]From Teaching Sustainability to Teaching with Sustainability: Embedding Environmental Thinking Across an Engineering Curriculum
*Xiaolei Feng1 (1.Nanyang Technological University)
Keywords:
education,sustainability,curriculum,engineering
Sustainability education in engineering is often delivered through standalone courses. While effective for introducing key concepts, this approach can position sustainability as an isolated topic rather than an intrinsic design consideration. This presentation proposes an alternative: integrating environmental thinking as a persistent lens across the entire materials science curriculum, grounded in geoscience understanding of Earth’s material cycles, energy budgets, and planetary boundaries.
First, a case study is presented from a 13-week undergraduate course on sustainable materials at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The course focuses on the five materials with greatest environmental impact—steel, cement, aluminium, plastics, and paper—and uses life-cycle reasoning, trade-off analysis, and systems thinking, taught and assessed through scaffolded activities, peer review, and open-ended evaluation tasks. Students develop the ability to justify material selection beyond performance and cost, incorporating environmental impact and uncertainty into engineering decisions.
The second part extends beyond this single course. Rather than adding new sustainability modules to already dense programmes, the approach distributes environmental awareness across multiple existing subjects. In courses spanning thermodynamics, ceramics, polymers, manufacturing, and structural materials, brief contextual interventions—short framing slides, guiding questions, and assessment prompts—link disciplinary knowledge to environmental consequences. For example, phase transformations in steelmaking connect naturally to lifecycle carbon emissions; polymer degradation mechanisms lead to microplastics and circular economy principles; and Hall-Héroult electrochemistry makes tangible the environmental costs of primary aluminium production. These small but repeated integrations encourage students to treat sustainability not as additional content but as a default dimension of engineering reasoning.
The presentation argues that such high-frequency, low-overhead interventions across courses may produce deeper conceptual change than isolated teaching. By shifting from “teaching sustainability” to “teaching with sustainability in mind,” educators can cultivate environmentally responsible decision-making without overloading curricula. This connects to the broader goals of SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action). The session concludes with practical strategies for instructors to implement this distributed model within existing courses, and invites discussion on adoption across geoscience and engineering disciplines in the Asia-Pacific region.
First, a case study is presented from a 13-week undergraduate course on sustainable materials at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The course focuses on the five materials with greatest environmental impact—steel, cement, aluminium, plastics, and paper—and uses life-cycle reasoning, trade-off analysis, and systems thinking, taught and assessed through scaffolded activities, peer review, and open-ended evaluation tasks. Students develop the ability to justify material selection beyond performance and cost, incorporating environmental impact and uncertainty into engineering decisions.
The second part extends beyond this single course. Rather than adding new sustainability modules to already dense programmes, the approach distributes environmental awareness across multiple existing subjects. In courses spanning thermodynamics, ceramics, polymers, manufacturing, and structural materials, brief contextual interventions—short framing slides, guiding questions, and assessment prompts—link disciplinary knowledge to environmental consequences. For example, phase transformations in steelmaking connect naturally to lifecycle carbon emissions; polymer degradation mechanisms lead to microplastics and circular economy principles; and Hall-Héroult electrochemistry makes tangible the environmental costs of primary aluminium production. These small but repeated integrations encourage students to treat sustainability not as additional content but as a default dimension of engineering reasoning.
The presentation argues that such high-frequency, low-overhead interventions across courses may produce deeper conceptual change than isolated teaching. By shifting from “teaching sustainability” to “teaching with sustainability in mind,” educators can cultivate environmentally responsible decision-making without overloading curricula. This connects to the broader goals of SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), and SDG 13 (Climate Action). The session concludes with practical strategies for instructors to implement this distributed model within existing courses, and invites discussion on adoption across geoscience and engineering disciplines in the Asia-Pacific region.