Sustainability in Engineering Higher Education In-person Roundtable Discussion at RAEng London

Description

Invitation from Royal Academy of Engineering to attend an in-person roundtable to discussion on sustainability and social responsibility in UK engineering higher education to be held at the Academy’s offices in central London from 10.30 – 14.30 on Monday 28 November 2022.

Sustainability in Engineering Higher Education
Empowering engineers with the skills to address the challenges created by climate change requires adapting both the technological and philosophical frameworks used in engineering education. This goal has been the subject of a programme of work at the Academy in recent months which aims to transform urgently undergraduate engineering education – what is taught and how – to embed sustainability (and wider issues of social responsibility) across all engineering courses in the UK.

Under its new chair, Keith Clarke, FREng, the Sustainability in Engineering Higher Education working group committed at its last meeting in September to a new and ambitious objective aimed at all UK engineering faculty and their influencers.

By July 2024 latest, all engineering undergraduate and associated courses must equip their students by graduation and entry into the workplace, with the necessary technical and social skills to participate in the urgent and rapid transition to the net zero economy.

To achieve this goal, we’re seeking out and championing universities who are already doing good work in this space, to learn from their practice, to provide support to them going forward and to build a community where this good practice can be scaled across the UK – and further afield.

Roundtable Programme
The roundtable will be chaired by Professor Emanuela Tilley, Director of the Integrated Engineering Programme at UCL and will be attended by a small number of engineering academics who have been selected and invited for their innovative practice in sustainability engineering education. An agenda will be forwarded shortly, but in brief:

• The Academy will share its plans around how it intends to champion and support good practice in sustainability engineering higher education. This includes consulting the group on a visual learning map for sustainability across engineering disciplines which is currently in development, and a sustainability toolkit (to be developed in 2023). We will also discuss how we’re working with the professional engineering institutions and the Engineering Council to develop sustainability guidelines as an overlay to AHEP4 and how we will work collectively to develop AHEP5.

• The roundtable will provide everyone with the opportunity to discuss their own experience of curricula development and pedagogy and, importantly to highlight the challenges and opportunities that they have faced in their journey to transformation.

In order to provide context and information for our discussions on 28 November, we will be following up this email with an invitation to participate in a very short survey, which should take no longer than 15 minutes to complete.

The survey is aimed at understanding what you have already achieved in bringing change in your current (or previous) Institution to ensure engineering programmes are aimed at teaching sustainability and fostering a sense of social responsibility in students, and what the challenges were that you/your colleagues faced and how you overcame them. We will collate and summarise responses and share them at the meeting.

Period	28 Nov 2022
Held at	Royal Academy of Engineering RAE, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National