Embedding Sustainability into Engineering Education: What Support Do the Teachers Need?

Research Paper Recommended citation: Karvinen, M., & Malkamäki, M. (2025). Embedding Sustainability into Engineering Education: What Support Do the Teachers Need?. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631495. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. EMBEDDING SUSTAINABILITY INTO ENGINEERING EDUCATION: WHAT SUPPORT DO THE TEACHERS NEED? M. Karvinena,1, M. Malkamäki b a Aalto University School of Engineering, Espoo, Finland, 0000-0002-4166-8379 b Aalto University School of Science, Espoo, Finland Conference Key Areas: Building the capacity and strengthening the educational competences of engineering educators; Improving higher engineering education through researching engineering education Keywords: Sustainability integration, engineering education, teacher needs, support ABSTRACT During the past two decades, engineering educators have increasingly been integrating sustainability in their teaching. However, a central obstacle in mainstreaming the integration in all education is the lack of competencies of the teachers. Even though some measures have been established to overcome this barrier, surprisingly little is known of what creates the feeling of being supported for the teachers. We interviewed fourteen teachers from the Nordic and Baltic technical universities to explore what factors they associate with a feeling of being supported, and what they find to hinder their actions. The most interesting finding was that almost all the other supporting factors that emerged, resources, funding, and commitment from top management, were underpin by the initiatives being officially recognized. The central factors underlying the challenges the teachers faced were related to the lack of institutional processes. Our findings can inform technical universities to improve the support they develop for teachers to integrate sustainability in the education. The findings can also encourage engineering educators to support each other in the joint sustainability endeavors. 1 Corresponding Author M. Karvinen [email protected] 1 INTRODUCTION During the past two decades, engineering education has increasingly been addressing the pressing issue of sustainability in teaching. However, many studies have indicated that a central obstacle to reach deeper levels of sustainability in higher education is the lack of competencies of the teachers (Rieckmann, 2019; Vare et al., 2019). Even though some measures have been established to overcome this barrier, such as educating the educators on sustainability (Schönach et al., 2021; Leal Filho et al., 2021), surprisingly little is known of what actually creates the feeling of being supported for the teachers. One of the core questions for teachers is how they understand sustainability. To be able to bridge one’s subject topic with sustainability, one needs to have a grasp on how our current (and past) societies utilize natural resources and drive climate change and ecosystem degradation towards tipping points (Richardson et al., 2023). In addition, to develop education that would promote a just sustainability transformation (Rockström et al., 2023), teachers should comprehend how their field contributes to it, and foster such knowledge, skills and mindsets that help students making conscious choices for sustainability in their future professions (UNESCO, 2017). This implies that sustainability education requires huge efforts from the educators, and the support provided for them deserves attention from universities. The Nordic and Baltic technical higher education institutions (HEIs) are well connected in terms of educational collaboration. Some active, high-level networks include the Nordtek and the Nordic Five Tech, which together cover 31 HEIs that provide engineering education in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These networks also include sustainability-related joint efforts; for example, the Nordtek network has a dedicated working group for sustainability education related development. Previous research done in this area on sustainability integration indicates that despite the region is renowned for ambitious sustainability endeavors, teachers in the HEIs face challenges with embedding sustainability in their teaching (Karvinen et al., 2017). The key obstacles include the lack of resources and commitment from top management, resistance to change, and lack of collaboration (Karvinen et al., 2017) – all of these have also been identified in a wider global review (Weiss et al., 2021). In addition to these listed barriers, sustainability in engineering education has been challenged by a technocratic and instrumentalist view on the purpose of engineering education (Mulder, 2017). Factors that seem to promote sustainability initiatives in general are connected to the barriers, including resources, collaborative efforts, and support from the management (Karvinen et al., 2017; Weiss et al., 2021). While the studies above provide general level information on the key drivers and barriers for sustainability integration in higher (engineering) education, they fail to explain how to empower the teachers and get sustainability integration more mainstreamed in engineering education. Therefore, we were interested in looking deeper into the factors that might lie behind these core drivers and obstacles. To shed more light into this topic, we decided to focus on the teachers who have been involved in sustainability initiatives in their institutions and therefore could have fruitful information of factors that have motivated or unmotivated them to act. We interviewed teachers from the Nordtek and Nordic Five Tech networks’ member universities. More specifically, we wanted to find out what factors they associate with a feeling of being supported, and what they found suppressing their actions. We additionally looked into the institutional support structures that exist in these institutions, however, this paper focuses only on the supporting and hindering factors, while the institution-level results are reported elsewhere (Karvinen & Malkamäki, 2025). The interview data that was gathered was primarily collected for the Master’s thesis of the second author (Malkamäki, 2025). The aim of this paper is to provide information for all technical universities on how they could develop support for the teaching staff to embed sustainability. Moreover, we hope that by sharing motivated educators’ experiences, this paper could empower engineering educators to collaborate around sustainability integration. 2 METHODOLOGY 2.1 Data collection We conducted fourteen semi-structured interviews to explore what makes faculty staff members feel their sustainability-related efforts or initiatives are supported, and what additional support they might still need when trying to embed sustainability in their courses or programmes. The interviewees were found utilizing the Nordtek network contacts, and partly by asking the first contacts to recommend a colleague suitable for our study. We targeted at having at least one participant from each country (Table 1) and to have diversity in terms of responsibilities of the interviewees: we wished to gain insights from course development and programme development, and complementary views from the administrational development tasks that relate to sustainability education. The interviews were conducted online by one of the authors through MS Teams in August-September 2024. The average length of an interview was 50 minutes. The interviews were recorded with the consent of the participants and auto transcribed using MS Teams tools. The participants were given the opportunity to view and correct the transcriptions, and permissions asked to use direct quotations in reporting the results. We refrain from reporting the titles or even genders of the specific participants to secure their anonymity, as this was their request. Table 1. Participant data. Country University N of Interviewees Denmark Technical University of Denmark (DTU) 2 Estonia Tallinn university of Technology (TalTech) 1 Finland Aalto University 1 Iceland University of Iceland 1 Latvia Riga Technical University (RTU) 1 Lithuania Vilnius Gediminas technical university (Vilnius Tech) 2 Norway Norwegian University of Science and Techn. (NTNU) 1 Sweden KTH Royal Institute of Technology 2 Sweden Umeå University 1 Sweden Uppsala University 2 All the interviewees had multiple years of work experience in academia and their titles included for example, associate professor, programme director, and university lecturer. Most of them had teaching responsibilities, but a few had moved to university-level administrational positions where they managed organizational development projects on sustainability education. All the interviewees were asked to describe a certain sustainability-related project they had been engaged in recently, and to reflect on the factors that affected the success of the project, and their feelings about how their efforts had been valued in their community. Most of the projects related to major reforms of existing courses, where sustainability had been integrated for example through structural changes. new assignments, or content, but some projects were about creating new compulsory or voluntary sustainability courses or reviewing the sustainability status of degree programmes. The National Committee of Research ethics was followed throguhout the research process. All participants signed a consent document before the interviews. There were no anticipated risks for participating in the research and no sensitive data was collected. 2.2 Data analysis The interview data was analysed with an abductive theme analysis that mainly followed the analysis steps described by Thompson (2022) (Table 2). Abductive analysis was chosen, as it allows for using both deductive and inductive approaches (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014). This analysis method was found particularly useful to point out what complementary findings our interviews brought to the current scientific understanding of the research topic. Thereby, the data was first coded deductively according to known divers and barriers from previous research. This set of codes was then complemented with codes that emerged from an inductive analysis. The codes were then categorised to form subthemes and themes. As a result, a map of themes and subthemes was created (Fig. 1). Table 2. Abductive theme analysis steps applied (adapted from Thompson, 2022). Analysis phase Description 1. Transcription and Familiarization Getting familiar with the data: listening to the interviews, correcting automated transcriptions, making reflective notes on potential interest areas relevant to research interests. 2. Coding 2-3 coding rounds to reach saturation (Thompson, 2022): Marking short excerpts from the data based on similarities or patterns across different excerpts. 3. Development of Themes Categorizing the codes into subthemes and themes that connect multiple codes to each other. 4. Data Display Creating a theme map that visualizes the codes, subthemes and themes. 5. Theorizing Elaborating on the relationships between the themes and the entire dataset. Connecting the results with previous research and aiming to explain the results. 6. Writing Up Describing the analysis process, its results, connections to previous research, and conclusions. 3 RESULTS Four key themes emerged from the data that created the feeling of being supported among the participants: support from management, peer support, getting recognition for one’s work, and getting resources (Fig. 1). The support needs identified from the interview data comprised three themes: sustainability contents, organizational challenges, and practical challenges (Fig. 1). We next describe the detailed results of the existing support factors, and then those of the challenges and support needs. Fig. 1. Theme map showing the subthemes (on the left) and themes that emerged from the abductive analysis. *Sustainability integration; **Engineering education. 3.1 Factors associated with feeling supported The main themes under this study item included few identifiable subthemes, for which we provide some examples here (quotations, see Tables 3-4). One of the most often mentioned support factors was an indication from the management that they support the initiative, such as acceptance of the project. Acceptance was described to be a crucial minimum that teachers would need as an indication that they are allowed to proceed with their initiatives1. In some cases, top management even facilitated collaboration between parties to help the initiative go forward2. Resources and recognition went often hand in hand for the participants. Tangible resources, such as being successful in internal funding calls, created both an enabling factor for allocating working time for the project in practice, but also a feeling of own work being appreciated and supported by the whole organization3-4. Educational development being recognized in career stage evaluation process created the same feeling of own efforts being valued.5 Some of the interviewed professors also brought up that getting own course into a degree programme’s curriculum felt rewarding. However, some professors gained similar rewarding feeling from teaching seminar courses with a small but motivated group of students.7 Peer support was among the most mentioned factors that the participants wanted to discuss. They particularly brought up how important it is to change ideas8 and benchmark practices9 about different means to integrate sustainability. Positive feedback to own ideas and initiatives was as well identified as highly rewarding. Table 3: Quotations relating to supporting factors. No Quotation 1 “[...] as a result of this review of the programme, my colleague and I had to write up an action plan for how we would deal with this review. [...] So that was approved by the faculty. So you could say that's kind of a quiet support, you know it was approved of. No one helped us but they said it's OK, go ahead.“ 2 “ [...] The way we were best aided as a team putting the course together was by the dean [vice president of education] saying that ‘you don't have to worry about resources. I'm the one making the resources work. I'm the one that's going to go and talk to each institute [faculty] on how we resource all of this. You only think about the academic side of putting this course together, so try to put the course that you think is best for the students and then tell me what you’d want to do.” 3 “Yes, they were very positive about my proposal and they support that the amount I asked for... I'm very happy with their support. They've helped me a lot. So they're very supportive. Yeah, seems to be, if they give money to mathematics doing sustainabilit y, it says a lot about them.” 4 “[...] And I would have done this even if we hadn't received any funding, but it's easier if you do and also you get acknowledgments for actually doing things. […] Every teacher is always striving to be as good at their work as possible. So you develop your courses and you stay updated and you do things in order to improve your teaching. And this [funding] is a way to emphasise that work, I think.” 5 “[...] we have this evaluation system in which such development is then evaluated if it should, add to the evaluation points. And if I remember correctly, I was given a few additional merit points for developing this course.” 6 “[…] Unfortunately, not many students came at that time. […] Then last year they asked me to introduce this course to another group of students where there is mandatory they have to take the course just as half of the course and that was quite success all of a sudden. […]” 7 “[...] that first time we had maybe 15 students, something like that. It was like, very nice to work with them and I think that they learned a lot and everybody could say what they think and participate in the discussions. Last year we had sixty students and it made it completely different because then you cannot individually discuss with everyone anymore and it might be that some students don’t participate in discussions at all, don’t necessarily say what they think, and might get a lot less out of the course than somebody else. And generally I would say that the small course was maybe more fruitful for everyone. [...]” 8 “I mean we have committees with all the programme directors of the engineering, both the civil engineer, the five year, but also for the three-year programmes and especially for the five year programmes, they are very positive and we learn from each other. And also we have had at least one educational conference per year here, sustainability issues was one topic this year.” 9 “[...] we looked around for us to see what other programmes were doing and what is a common approach to addressing sustainability in educational programmes and well, first we talked to [a colleague], who's responsible for [another programme in the same university], who had already implemented a type of a process for integrating sustainability competences in an engineering programme [...]” 3.2 Challenges and support needs The identified support needs comprised three themes, which are described in detail below (quotations, Table 4). The key result, emphasised by nine interviewees, that seemed to affect all the discussed challenges was that teaching staff and other university employees lack knowledge about sustainability in general, and on how to teach it. This then reflects to all levels of educational development. Challenges that were brought up specifically concerning the concept of sustainability included the general lack of knowledge of sustainability, difficulties in defining and discussing sustainability within the engineering education context, and varying perspectives on what can be considered as sufficient integration. Six participants identified a colleague who indicated resistance to change10-11 when trying to make sustainability integration initiatives. This was therefore one of the key challenges. In addition, ambiguity regarding whose responsibility it is to implement sustainability initiatives was brought up as an important barrier12-13, as well as a lack of continuity in integration efforts due to insufficient organizational processes. Other mentioned challenges included the non-standardized nature of university audits, unclear criteria for what constitutes adequate sustainability integration in engineering education, and difficulties in measuring the impact of these efforts on students’ learning. It was for example said that there are currently no clear ways to measure the stage of sustainability integration in engineering education in universities, which would facilitate individual integration efforts. One interviewee also brough up that some people are hesitant to creating any measurements to avoid sustainability integration becoming a tick-in-the-box activity without having any impact on teaching. Finally, the autonomy of faculties and departments was among the institutional barriers, which complicates the implementation of university-wide strategies. Practical challenges that the participants mentioned were limited resources and difficulties in arranging courses that have sustainability principles embedded. The interviewees for example mentioned the lack of time strongly restricting their abilities to work on their project in a level they would have preferred. Many interviewees also said that they were overall too busy in their positions. Practical administrative tasks were the key reason that hindered the successful implementation of courses. For example, guest lecturers’ payments and organizing large university wide courses took time from the actual teaching of sustainability. Here, the interviewee referred to the support factors and said that the university or faculties could help to overcome the challenges by providing resources and facilitating collaboration between the teachers involved in the course. Table 4: Quotations relating to challenges and support needs. No Quotation 10 “[...] those who don't want to get involved, [...] So you have to probably wait generations out. [...] it's very hard to ask people to go and do something other than what they are doing. So right now the old generation.” 11 “But many say things like, ‘No, I don't have time to do that. And it's more important that we make sure that we get good engineers in the different disciplines.’ [...] So there is some resistance. Not too much. I mean, it's so much better now than 10 years ago, but still it's like ‘I can't put anything more in my course. It's packed.’ Yeah, but you can tweak things and you can have more argumentation, more discussions, more like creativity in the course. But it's tough for some.” 12 “[...] everyone doesn't have to be as involved in this but we have to have a couple of teachers or a handful of teachers that take responsibility for adding this layer in courses where it's relevant really, [...]” 13 “It's not really the teachers in the course or the course responsibles, it's not really their responsibility.  I think it's for us as programme directors of the different programmes and it's also, of course, from the faculty level. And from the faculty level, we have not had so much help, I would say.” 4 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Our findings strengthen the views that have emerged from earlier studies. Sustainability integration does require resources, motivated and sufficiently competent teachers, and managers that facilitate the efforts (Karvinen et al., 2017; Weiss et al., 2021). The efforts are mainly suppressed by the lack of all these and by the ambiguity of sustainability as a concept (Karvinen et al., 2017; Weiss et al., 2021). However, some novel findings that emerged from our data through inductive analysis help explain what is underpinning these somewhat familiar findings. The most interesting finding in our interviews was the effect of recognition. Teachers really seem to be empowered by the appreciation they receive from their efforts, either by students, peers, or the management. This was also connected to the funding and personnel resources the participants had received, as well as to the support and help they had got from the management – in the interview data, it almost felt like the recognition and appreciation shown to the teachers was the best reward for them, and the actual support, funding or other resources, were only a secondary, yet crucial mechanism that enabled their work. In practice, this means that the institutions seem to lack proper incentive mechanisms for educational development in general, and specifically to sustainability-related initiatives. On the support needs and challenges our results indicate that despite sustainability integration has been actively discussed for at least two decades, the practical work still lacks adequate institutional processes and support mechanisms. Our interviews revealed for example that there is ambiguity on whose responsibility the integration is and who should be leading the work - individual teachers, programme directors, or top managers. This implies deficiencies in how the ambitious sustainability strategies of Nordic and Baltic technical HEIs become implemented through institutional processes. It also implies shortcomings in how educational development around sustainability is being organized. These lacking institutional processes to support sustainability integration seemed to underpin also our participants’ ponderings on lacking criteria for sufficient integration, or measuring of students’ learning of sustainability, as these are tools that could substantially facilitate grassroot level and bottom-up work, but ought to be facilitated through top-down processes to reach adequate impact in the institutions. To conclude, this study extends current understanding of the drivers and barriers of integrating sustainability into engineering education. Our findings particularly help review the current means to develop the integration and motivate the educators. The implications of our findings particularly emphasize a shift in focus from how to educate the educators to how to set common goals and facilitate educators’ work through improving institutional processes. Based on our interviews, it seems evident that the best motivating factor for teachers to act for sustainability is to see and feel that their work is appreciated. We therefore encourage all managers, engineering educators, and students to courageously promote the good examples that exist in the universities, but we specifically suggest the universities to also consider more formal means of rewarding and incentivizing sustainability initiatives to boost action in the community. Further, we strongly recommend reviewing institutional practices in place for sustainability integration, as our study indicates that many institutions could invest more in creating common understanding of the goals of sustainability integration, means to embed it in curricula, and to facilitate collaboration between teachers, departments, and different disciplines. 5 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to sincerely thank all the interviewees for their valuable contributions to this study. We also thank the Co-Educators Project of Aalto University that enabled this work by providing financial and collegial support, and the Nordic-Baltic networks that helped finding suitable interviewees and scope for the study.