Engineering education and competences for sustainability education in Spain

Abstract

Education, and particularly engineering education, is a key tool to be used for facing today’s challenges and for building a more sustainable world. Although sustainability education is already very much part of curricula in some fields of engineering education (as in the case of environmental engineering) but the question is concerning all other fields which are not directly connected to the concept of sustainability. In this work it presents an analysis on the treatment given to the competences for sustainability in a set of pilot projects developed in engineering education area with the collaboration of the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) and within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) framework. The importance attributed to sustainability competences in the profiles and objectives of the different proposed degrees has been analyzed, The results show that, in general, the competences for sustainability education are poorly defined and included in these projects and there exist a great distance between which it is declared and what it occurs at level of the new curricular proposals.