Student’s perspectives on Education for Sustainable Development in a problem based learning environment

In a society characterized by fast technological advances and increasing pressure on economic, ecological as well as social systems, it is important to educate engineers with a broader, reflective and sustainable perspective in alignment with their professional practice. This poses challenges to most engineering programmes, and scholars argue that a paradigm shift is needed to developing engineering education (EE) to embrace education for sustainable development (ESD). However, some of the more innovative pedagogies as for example problem based and project organised learning (PBL) already seem to bring EE on the right trajectory to ESD. For example, the pedagogical recommendations for ESD include active and student-centred learning, which are two of the basic principles of PBL. Some engineering educational systems have already implemented PBL and the question is whether engineering students at these PBL institutions experience the strength of this pedagogy when being educated for sustainability. This paper aims to investigate how students perceive and integrate ESD in a PBL environment. Results exemplify how PBL moves beyond awareness about sustainability as the problem based learning model encourage students to contextualise engineering problems and solutions and apply knowledge about sustainability in real life contexts.