A Procedure for Analysing ESD Curricula Applied on Engineering Programmes at Swedish Universities

Paper in proceeding, 2013

There are several different methods for implementing curricular elements, but fairly few procedures for determining the success of the implementation. The central question is whether the student has mastered the desired set of skills and the expertise that fulfil the ambitions of the original policy documents. This paper presents a procedure for analyzing how ambitions related to education for sustainable development (ESD) are implemented in educational programmes, i.e. how political ambitions are cascaded down to the level that the student meets in the courses. The method was applied to the programmes in chemical engineering, mechanical engineering and engineering physics at two Swedish universities. The methodological framework is based on analyses of how ambitions on ESD are handled in texts in relevant documents at different levels and the relation between these. The selected texts were: the national degree ordinance, university policy documents, programme curricula, intended course learning outcomes, and learning assessment texts. While the study is focused on the inclusion of sustainable development competences in engineering education, the presented procedure should be general enough for application to any studied aspect of skills in a programme, in particular when this skill is developed in several different courses. The described procedure can also be used to monitor changes over time.