A Thematic and Trend Analysis of Engineering Education for Sustainable Development.

There is a push for integrating concepts of sustainability and sustainable development in engineering education. The U.S. National Society of Professional Engineers' Code of Ethics expects engineers "to adhere to the principles of sustainable development in order to protect the environment for future generations". This push has resulted in significant research and efforts to reform engineering curricula to focus on sustainable development, or the "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" in the 1987 Brundtland Commission's report. Such research and reform efforts can manifest in several forms and contexts, and it can be difficult to obtain a broader picture of how engineering education as a whole is progressing in this area. To help provide a view of that picture, this paper strives to understand the recent trends in engineering education research for sustainable development by analyzing the relationships between the increasingly popular topics of sustainability and sustainable development and how they have evolved over the past two decades. Using text network analysis, a natural language processing technique, this study explores the thematic structure of scholarly publications that address the integration of sustainability and/or sustainable development in engineering courses, across curricula and across disciplines. In particular, we extract the thematic structure of over 1,500 abstracts of conference proceedings published in the American Society of Engineering Education related to this issue. With the aid of co-occurrence network maps and epoch trend analysis, we identify the major topics among these engineering education studies. Analyses of these trends indicate that the topics of sustainability and sustainable development have been consistently addressed primarily in civil engineering education research for the past two decades. This implies that these topics have not appeared in many other disciplinary areas of research. In addition, renewable energy is one of the more prevalent topics within the area of engineering education for sustainable development. We report our detailed results by providing insights on how these topics have evolved over time, and the semantic similarities between topics that have similar trending patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]