Publication
This workshop addresses two major preoccupations in engineering education: the need to integrate sustainability and transversal skill development. In addition to knowledge about sustainability, engineering students require skills for effectively integrating these concepts into their work to both perceive opportunities and to convince others to adopt more sustainable approaches. It is these skills that are the focus of this workshop. Participants will experience an interactive activity with tangibles, designed for engineering students, that targets the development of 3 transversal skills relevant to sustainability: systems thinking, perspective taking and negotiation. This activity employs a three-facet framework for teaching transversal skills: knowing (strategies and models to implement the skill), experiencing (opportunities to apply the skills and encounter relevant difficulties) and learning by experience (meta-cognitive/emotional reflection to promote transfer). Workshop activities provide structured opportunities to consider how to create learning experiences that embody the evidence-informed criteria of providing relevant information on implementing the targeted skills, supporting low-stakes experimentation, delivering timely feedback and encouraging transfer into future contexts. This workshop provides engineering educators with both a specific activity (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10731771) and a general framework (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13328581) for designing activities to teach transversal skills. Engineering students consistently express interest in developing their transversal skills and in sustainability. By exploiting their dual motivations, this workshop offers a practical way to equip students with skills fundamental for responsible engineers.