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Public engagement and participation are best understood as fluid and evolving categories that embrace the many ways in which citizens collaborate on, intervene in, oppose or deliberate over matters that concern them. In recent years the role that the public occupies in climate action debates has expanded and has given rise to new knowledge co-creation practices and deliberative decision-making processes. It is increasingly acknowledged that meaningful public engagement in climate action requires well-informed, equal and inclusive processes. There is a compelling body of work internationally in support of embedding deliberative democratic practices more deeply to strengthen public engagement. In this report we explore some of these innovative practices and processes, and present the main findings from the project 'Engaging, Envisioning, and Co-Producing Pathways for a Low Carbon, Climate Resilient Ireland (Imagining2050)', which was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and co-funded by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI). The aim of the project was to engage with civil society using innovative co-creation and deliberative approaches, and test these approaches, to explore and consolidate future visions of and pathways to a low-carbon and climate-resilient future in Ireland.

Barriers to the development of renewable energy generally involve non-technical as well as technical challenges, that are dynamic and context dependent. In the case of opposition to large-scale wind energy and overhead transmission lines for example, existing research reveals a complex and diverse range of conditions that shape public perception. However, conventional engineering practices tend to focus on least cost techno-economic evaluation methods such as cost benefit analysis. Here we use the case study example of Ireland’s North-South interconnector project to demonstrate how a narrow focus on techno- economic analysis resulted in failure to adequately incorporate broader socio-political considerations. It demonstrates that the primarily technocentric worldview, which largely pervades engineering teaching and practices, can cause tensions and inertia, slowing the rate of progress along the low carbon transition. This, we argue, points to the need for a cultural / ethos change in engineering education and practice. Engineers should be encouraged and educated to broaden their perspectives and take a more reflective / pragmatic approach to engineering challenges that embraces the diversity of worldviews within our society. We hypothesise that the clear (and necessary) emphasis within engineering curricula on solving purely technical / mathematical problems may foster a reductionist hubris in engineering practice. To address this, contemporary fit-for-purpose curricula necessitate the inclusion of coursework that considers broader societal complexities, including so-called ‘wicked problems’ such as infrastructure projects, which involve placing engineering solutions in broader societal contexts.

Because wicked Sustainability Problems (WSPs) are complex, multi-scaled, value-laden, ill-structured, and difficult to address (for example see Lonngren et al., 2016), teams that include engineers and others with expert knowledge are needed to effectively manage WSPs relating to environmental stress and declining ecosystem health, including WSPs stemming from resource scarcity, biodiversity loss, and climate change. How do we educate engineers to successfully engage in such transdisciplinary teams? What is transdisciplinary education? This paper explores aspects of these questions. First, we review areas of education literature relevant to transdisciplinary teaching and learning, including frameworks such as “Threshold Concepts” (Meyer & Land, 2006) and “Empathic Thinking” (Walther et al., 2017), and pedagogies reported in the literature, including “Value Analysis”, and “Learning Communities” (McGregor, 2017). We introduce the design-based research methodology (DBR) as a framework for developing transdisciplinary education, and we offer a review of the engineering education literature relevant to transdisciplinary training. Next, a case study employing DBR is presented. This case, inspired by the work of Tejedor & Segalas (2018a) and others, extends the work presented by Morgan et al. (2018), which reports a novel sustainable development workshop experience for masters-level graduate students, organized and hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in the spring of 2017. A second workshop was deployed in June of 2018, during which students from a variety of backgrounds and institutions gathered in UPV to create locally relevant, sustainable, conceptual designs for the built environment. The DBR case study focuses on this 2nd workshop, during which survey, interview, and focus group data reflecting both the student and the facilitator experiences, were collected. An initial interpretation of this data is presented. This paper contributes to engineering education for sustainable development because it emphasizes a meta- framework which conceptualizes the development of transdisciplinary education experiences and which has the potential to enable faculty to reflect on and improve novel transdisciplinary experiences.

As part of an introductory energy engineering undergraduate module at University College Cork, student presentations on a zero-carbon energy plan for Ireland have shown a high preference for nuclear energy, despite a complete absence of nuclear energy from the same module curriculum. Nuclear power has never been built or generated in Ireland, is currently illegal, and faces high levels of public opposition. The origins of a high preference for nuclear energy among undergraduate student engineers is therefore unclear. In response to this high preference for, but critically unengaged view of nuclear power, the authors developed a participatory learning activity for first year undergraduate engineering students to engage with a range of maximally different perspectives on nuclear power. Four different perspectives on whether Ireland needs nuclear power were presented to this year’s class: definitely yes; definitely no; maybe yes; maybe no. These perspectives involved a number of different framings of nuclear power and ranged across a spectrum from techno-economic to socio-technical. They emphasised to a greater or lesser degree issues around risk, cost, system impacts, timing, social acceptability, and sustainability. The activity took place in a room divided into four quadrants with each quadrant representing one of the four different perspectives on nuclear power. At the start of activity, students were invited to go to the quadrant that best represented their initial views. Each perspective on nuclear power was then delivered in a short expert presentation by one of the co- authors. Throughout these presentations, students were invited to remain in or move from their quadrant as they were persuaded or not by the arguments advanced. At the start of the activity, an overwhelming majority (96%) of the students indicated a yes preference with the majority of these being maybe yes (79%); at the end of the debate the total yes share had significantly decreased (to 54%), with the largest share of the lost vote moving to the maybe no category which finished at 36% (having started at 0%). Overall, there was a greater distribution of students across all four categories than at the start. Evaluations on the activity format were largely positive. Student reasons for changing their views were mostly socio-technical points specific to Ireland that included the electricity system, overall energy needs, costs and expert availability. Closing reflections introduced the idea of a wicked problem and highlighted the importance of values to questions such as “Should Ireland Go Nuclear”, i.e. avoiding an exclusively narrow scientific framing.

An essential aspect of engineering education is the provision of core competences in discipline specific knowledge and its application. Added to this, engineering education must equip its students with a range of transferable skills in order to facilitate their working within a variety of organisations, skills which are much valued by employers. Critically for the 21st century, engineering graduates entering the workforce must be equipped with knowledge and competences in sustainability / sustainable development, as this is becoming more and more important within organisations. More importantly it is an existential imperative for humanity, which is of particular relevance to young people, including newly graduated engineers who must be equipped with sustainability knowledge and competences to effectively contribute to the good of a society that needs to transition to a sustainable pathway. Such competencies are also required by professional accreditation organisations. This may require paradigmatic change in how we view both our profession and the world we inhabit. This paper briefly highlights a number of proposed sustainability related skills and competences. It then focuses on the development of these through open-ended activities and problems. This is based on the active learning premise where students achieve better quality learning by actively doing things themselves. The paper outlines four examples of activities undertaken at University College Cork and at the University of Seville. They include a transdisciplinary group exercise, environmental consultancy role-play, sustainability / environmental debates, and converting a closed well-defined problem into an open-ended one followed by the addition of layers of complexity and holistic considerations. It highlights the learning outcomes, transferable skills and sustainability knowledge and competences that students may obtain from undertaking the highlighted activities.

This paper is presented within the broader theme of considering what non-engineering-discipline specific sustainability / sustainability development (SD) knowledge and competences should be included in engineering education, in particular for four year undergraduate or four to five year integrated master’s programmes. Over the last 20 years, sustainability / SD has grown in importance, and consequently many engineering programmes have endeavoured to integrate it within their programmes. The UCC chemical engineering is one of these programmes. The inclusion of sustainability / SD content inherently contains engineering discipline specific content, but also includes content that is non-discipline specific and could potentially be undertaken by any engineering student. This paper looks at the University College Cork (UCC) Process and Chemical Engineering programme, and outlines the content that is considered as non- discipline specific. This includes the following which are briefly outlined in more detail within the paper: Basic concepts in sustainability and SD: What is it all about? The importance of framing; The environmental dimension, ecological systems thinking and importance of ecological limits; The role of environmental legislation; Humanity’s grand challenges; the food-energy-water nexus and climate change; The game-changer: The socio-economic dimension (including ecological economics); its essential role in transitioning to and maintaining a sustainable society; its impact on engineering and to what extent engineering can have influence on the socio-economic dimension; Holistic thinking; inherent interconnectedness, life cycle thinking and assessment; Energy, its importance and its commonality to all engineering disciplines, and beyond; Acquiring soft skills of critical thinking, communication, working with others, embracing uncertainty and complexity; Transdisciplinarity, emergent knowledge, and the need to be able to work with others outside our disciplinary “silo”; Values, ethics and the normative nature of sustainability choices and narratives; Worldviews, paradigms, and links with consumptive growth (material, energy, information); Transformational change; going beyond the quantitative and reductionist and the role of narrative, imagination, myth and metaphor in precipitating authentic societal and cultural change.

The proceedings of the Innovative Methods of Community Engagement: Toward a Low Carbon, Climate Resilient Future workshop have been developed by the Imagining2050 team in UCC and the Secretariat to the National Dialogue on Climate Action (NDCA). The NDCA also funded the workshop running costs. The proceedings offer a set of recommendations and insights into leveraging different community engagement approaches and methodologies in the area of climate action. They draw from interdisciplinary knowledge and experiences of researchers for identifying, mobilizing and mediating communities. The work presented below derives from a workshop held in the Environmental Research Institute in UCC on the 17th January 2019. These proceedings are complementary to an earlier workshop also funded by the NDCA and run by MaREI in UCC, titled ‘How do we Engage Communities in Climate Action? – Practical Learnings from the Coal Face’. The earlier workshop looked more closely at community development groups and other non-statutory organizations doing work in the area of climate change.

The project of modernity has emanated from and pervaded Western life and culture for almost four centuries. It increasingly pervades an ever more globalised world, threatening cultural diversity and wisdom developed across diverse cultures and traditions. It promotes a paradigm of reduction and separation, promoting an individualistic consumerism (via an ideology of (infinite) growth), the driving force behind the contemporary crisis of unsustainability, as manifested by climate change, biodiversity and cultural loss/extinction, increased individualism/narcissism over collective/community, increased anxiety, and throwaway materialistic consumerism. The project of modernity, which has promised and delivered great goods, has been too smart for its own good; uber-smart trumps ancient wisdom. Western Christian culture has striven to develop and propogate this paradigm to the detriment of other global traditions, cultures and associated wisdoms. Indigenous cultures often emphasise the ecocosmological interconnectedness contra dominant Western culture, which has embraced competition, domination and control, often shrouded in a cosmology of ‘manifest destiny’. While the above presents a compelling narrative, the reality is more complex. Just as indigenous cultures can offer a rich and diverse understandings and appreciation of universal interconnection and a corresponding ethic, neither is this lacking among the Western Judeo-Christian tradition. Within this tradition, strong counter narratives have always existed. Heraclitus envisioned a world of process and continuous change and dialectic necessary opposites (echoing Eastern Taoist conceptions of complimentary Yin and Yang), in contrast to the more concrete rationalism of Plato. Francis of Assisi spoke of Brother Sun and Mother Earth, feeling a deep sense of communion with the natural world, while many Western academics, thinkers and influencers have always been to the fore in developing alternative conceptions to the dominant paradigm. This paper highlights alternative conceptions across Western Christian thought, recognising that indigenous diversity is enriched through all cultures and traditions. Examples include developments in process philosophy and eco-theology, as well as Pope Francis’ contemporary devastating critique of the individualistic throwaway globalised monoculture that a technocratic hypermodernity promotes.

This paper envisages a masters level module, as part of an integrated masters level degree in chemical engineering (but which can also be taken by other engineers, such as energy engineers), as a suitable module for bringing together broader (societal level) considerations around the implications of contemporary carbon cycle disruption with possible interventions. These would include interventions in particular at the technological level, through the preferential capture, storage and utilisation of carbon. In this way, the module can build on standard undergraduate chemical engineering modules in unit operations, mass transfer and environmental engineering to (while by drawing on research informed expertise of the lecturer) consider specific potential technological interventions in the CCS and utilisation space. It can also however both draw on and add to prior learnings from broader contexts and domains such as in the realms of industrial ecology, ecological economics, technological indeterminism, sustainability narratives and policy, in particular through the use of an overarching context of carbon cycles. It also affords the opportunity for graduate students to develop critical thinking in relation to an ever-evolving socio-technological, economic and policy landscapes, and to help the goal of facilitating the development of fit-for-purpose engineering graduates in the wake of the consequences of ruptured carbon cycles.

This paper explores the experiences of an ‘Interdisciplinary Sustainability Assessment Laboratory’ (‘ISA Lab’) workshop, which took place over a week at Universitat Politècnica de València during April 2017. The workshop drew together students from a range of disciplines from across engineering and science, law and the social sciences and from a range of countries and backgrounds, including North and South America, Europe and Asia. It also facilitated a rich co-creative learning environment as it was led by (engineering) academic faculty from across Europe (Spain, UK, Netherlands and Ireland) as well as North America (Canada), as well as local experts who helped provide participants with appropriate context and guidance. The workshops culminated with a number of presentations from respective student groups, where they outlined an integrated development plan for a selected real life local project.

Since writing about the ‘the need to embed sustainability’ into chemical engineering programmes in a 2009 paper (Byrne & Fitzpatrick, 2009), the authors have endeavoured to walk the walk by helping embed sustainability into the Process & Chemical Engineering undergraduate degree programme at University College Cork. This has been achieved both through the development of ‘primary’ bespoke modules with explicit sustainability related foci, as well as through the development of a coherent sustainability related context right throughout the programme, and across modules more generally. Nearly a decade on, this approach yielded international recognition, with a successful submission by the authors on behalf of their programme, which resulted in the award of the 2016 Teaching Sustainability Award by the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), an award given with the purpose of ‘encouraging the development of better approaches to integrating sustainability principles and values into undergraduate teaching’ among IChemE accredited programmes globally. This paper provides a reflective account of the evolution (in thinking and practice) made to the Process & Chemical Engineering degree at University College Cork over the past number of years on its sustainability journey, from the perspective of the authors who have championed this journey, and demonstrates how a confluences of various environmental factors, operating at various levels, can help facilitate iterative change and development.

Recent directions in engineering for sustainable development (EESD) (and in ESD more generally) have pointed towards an increasing realisation that in order to adequately begin to address respective meta-problems associated with global (un)sustainability, ‘object world’ disciplinary perspectives alone are insufficient. Instead, the required depth of knowledge that expert disciplinary knowledge can provide must be both complimented and built upon by other disciplinary as well as experiential knowledge. Integral and transdisciplinary approaches to learning can play a central role in helping achieve this. When such approaches are applied, they facilitate the possibility of new and emergent knowledge and insights which can transcend disciplinary bounds, with the potential to reach places where no single disciplinary approach can; a classic case of ‘whole greater than the sum of parts’. This however requires a degree of disciplinary humility and openness to other approaches and disciplinary norms, as well as a degree of trust, patience and time. Nevertheless, in the context of seeking authentic sustainability, it is necessary. The classical engineering degree structure is not amenable to this approach. Engineering has traditionally seen itself as a ‘problem solving profession only insofar as ‘problems’, including complex socio-technological ones (with ecological and economic import) can be neatly reduced to well-defined closed system decontextualized ‘puzzles’ which can then be algorithmically optimised. This is deeply problematic as it cannot map reality; specifically, complex contemporary 21st century reality, instead resulting in emergent ‘unintended consequences’. A key intervention point therefore in the development of a fit-for-purpose cohort of engineering graduates capable of addressing emergent twenty first century meta-problems is through their formative education. Here integral and transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability education/ESD offer a useful approach. But this requires not just the inclusion of ‘sustainable development material’, but a perpendicular reconceptualization of pedagogical approaches. This approach coheres with contemporary pedagogical best practice as it privileges relational and constructivist approaches to learning over the traditional atomistic approach, incorporating as it does, peer to peer and personal reflective learning opportunities. This paper reflects on the experiences of a programme where undergraduate chemical engineering students undertaking a sustainability module collaborate with students on an analogous sociology module. It describes how this transdisciplinary collaboration takes an integral approach to sustainability learning, incorporating both subjective and objective perspectives as well as inter-subjective and inter-objective. The work reflects on how this initiative worked by drawing on student feedback and the authors’ experiences.

This paper looks at the application of peer instruction via in-class concept questions, an approach based on a constructivist conception of learning (as opposed to a ‘transmissionist’ model) that facilitates the engagement of learners through active learning opportunities (Smith et al, 2009). This approach has been adopted using both ‘high tech’ (clickers) and ‘low tech’ (flashcards) approaches (Mazur, 1997, 2009), whereby crucially, ‘no significant differences were found in conceptual learning gains’ between either approach (Lasry, 2008). The current paper considers the use of flashcards to facilitate peer discussion and learning in a fluid mechanics module and elicits learner reflections on how this approach better facilitates learning relative to a ‘traditional’ lecturing approaches. It also reflects on how this approach compares with other technological innovations aimed at supporting learning. Conclusions are drawn around the need to place the pedagogical horse ahead of the technological cart when considering teaching approaches.