Impact of teacher training on enhancing sustainability integration into engineering education

Engineering education institutions face a growing demand to provide graduates with adequate skills to respond to the sustainability crisis at hand. One approach to address this is to integrate sustainability as a cross-cutting theme into programmes and courses. At the same time competence development of academic staff is seen as an essential, yet underdeveloped prerequisite for a sustainability paradigm shift. Aiming at enhancing sustainability integration into engineering education, this study investigates the impact of pedagogical training on the skills and motivations of teachers to embed sustainability into their teaching. A new pedagogical course (3 ECTS) on sustainability in teaching was developed and executed at Aalto University four times during 2021-2022. The research data consists of course feedback, written reflection assignments, questionnaires to course participants, and a set of semi-structured interviews with teachers who had completed the training. In the analysis, we utilized an application of the four-level Kirkpatrick model of evaluating training impact. Preliminary results indicate that training is effective, especially when providing hands-on and customized support for teachers with different starting points for sustainability integration, and that both interdisciplinary and field-specific peer-support and learning are important elements of an impactful training. Apart from providing new knowledge on the impact of training on teacher capabilities, the study contributes to the development and improvement of pedagogical support for engineering educators to integrate sustainability into their teaching.