Engineering education and sustainability. Sustainable Technology Excellence Program (STEP-Vilanova)

Embedding Sustainability in technological curricula has become a crucial factor for educating engineers with competences in sustainability. The Sustainable Technology Excellence Program STEP2015 has been designed in order to assure a successful Sustainability Embedding into all the degrees offered at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech. This Program takes advantage of the opportunity that the redesign of all Bachelor and Master Degrees in Spain by 2010 under the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) framework offered. The STEP program goals are: • To design compulsory courses in sustainability in each degree; • To develop the conceptual base and identify reference models in sustainability for all specialities; • Create an internal interdisciplinary network of faculty from all the schools; • To initiate new transdisciplinary research activities in technology-sustainability-education; • To spread the know-how attained, • To achieve international scientific excellence in technology-sustainability-education • To graduate the first engineers/architects of the new EHEA bachelors with sustainability as a generic competence. The program has been structured in 4 phases: Phase 1. To analyse Sustainability Competences and strategies within Barcelona Tech, and benchmark with other technological universities in order to develop a feasible and effective program. Phase 2. To carry out a pilot implementation of the STEP program in 5 schools. Phase 3. To spread the implementation to 10 Schools of UPC taking advantage of the lessons learnt in the pilot experiences. The goal here is to spread out all the know-how attained in the process to all schools in order to ensure that all UPC graduates acquire the competence in sustainability and social commitment. Phase 4. To apply the program to all UPC schools and departments. In this context, the goal of this document is to present the different actions carried out in the Engineering School of Vilanova i la Geltrú, the lessons learnt and the outcomes of the application of the program.