What do our students know about the future challenges of sustainability?: Engineering students sustainable developement awareness in France

Résumé En

There is no doubt that sustainable development (SD) education is crucial forachieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and we believe thatengineering students are important actors for developing SD actions. However, wehave few information about how engineering students think about SD issues. Thepapers aims to investigate engineering students’ sustainability awareness in theprism of the SDG. This is a key point in order to design well suited multi- ortransdisiplinary curriculum in engineering education so as to develop theirawareness of the key role they have to play. We applied an online quantitativesurvey to French engineering students at first year master level just before startingtheir specific courses in SD and entrepreneurship. This survey covered differentdimensions: SD awareness, SD perception and actions towards SD. Our primaryfindings show that engineering students mostly associate SD to environmental endeconomic aspects related to technology (e.g.: renewable energy, low energyconsumption, recycling or zero waste) and pay less attention to social aspects likesocial responsibility and partnership. They consider SD is very important at theglobal and national level but less important in their professional or personal life. Theyare reluctant to integrate SD actions in their everyday practice mainly because oflack of convenience or financial constraints.There is thus a room for raising theirawareness about the central role of engineering in SDGs achievement and theirunderstanding about the social impact of engineering. It would also worth puttingmore emphasis on social responsibility in their engineering curriculum.