Sustainable development

1
Sustainable development

• An educational challenge
• Paul Sharratt

2
Sustainable Development

• Change to make the world a better place for
  everybody today and tomorrow
• BUT are we serious?

3
Drivers for universities

• Professional body pressure to introduce into
  curricula
• Marketing opportunity / student demand
• Funding source
• (Rather limited) demand from employers?

4
Sustainable Development for Companies and
Countries

• What must Sustainable Development mean to a world
  economy that is
• Fossil-fuelled ?
• Working from a limited, unsustainable palette of
  raw materials ?
• Demanding rapid growth in living standards ?
• Full of heavily armed poor people ?
• Business opportunity?
• Business as Usual?
• Incremental Change?
• Step Change?
• Sustainable Development is meaningless without an
  innovation agenda

5
Some questions

• Will Sustainable Development inform what I do on
  Monday morning?
• Will it make a difference?
• Is my organisation buying into the full
  implications, or just complying?
• Am I just thinking about a possible solution or
  committed to finding one?

6
The role of engineers and scientists

• Servants, leaders or partners?
• Innovation or incremental?
• New interactions with politics and the media?

7
Issues for teaching

• High quality university graduates should be
  agents for change (not efficient purveyors of the
  status quo)
• Skills required
• Technical (but with flexibility)
• Problem solving
• Interpersonal
• Project management
• Political
• Etc

8
Approach in CEAS

• Embed SD in the curriculum as a CONTEXT for
  technical work
• As a design boundary condition
• As a background motivation for problems
• To support discussion and debate about broader
  implications of technical solutions
• Build relevant skills throughout course
• Hard-nosed culture in opportunity assessment

9
Activities in CEAS

• RAE-funded visiting chair (David Slater)
• Course is being rebuilt around problem-solving
  rather than talk and chalk
• Removal of rigid module framework
• A better place to fit SD
• Project to produce generic support modules and
  embed a real case study (Adele Aubrey, David
  Slater, CEAS)

10
New Module

• Generic learning support elements containing key
  concepts
• Web-based, self-assessed
• Usable individually or to form whole module
• Case study (PVC recycling using Vinyloop)
• Wide range of issues
• Link to many elements of year 2 curriculum in
  chemical engineering

11
Vinyloop
12
Thank you