2025/06/04 by Esther Roorda, Emily Shilton, Sathish Gopalakrishnan · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Environmental Science · Engineering · #Sustainability in Higher Education #Recycling and Waste Management Techniques #Engineering Education and Curriculum Development
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3736647
openalex publication_date 2025/06/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Addressing the rapid increase in global e-waste production, and the embodied carbon of consumer electronics requires a shift towards a more sustainable computer engineering paradigm centered around “slow consumption” practices like repair. We argue that effective sustainability education is a critical part of effecting this change. Through surveys and interviews with students, repair experts, and community members, we investigate existing attitudes and levels of sustainability literacy among engineering students, and outline opportunities for meaningful teaching and learning. We develop, deliver, and evaluate a university-level course centered on electronic repair, drawing on evidence-based pedagogical strategies for meaningfully building sustainable development competencies. The aim of the course was to build both practical repair skills and critical sustainability competencies, and to bring students into conversations and longer term collaboration with the broader community. Our findings indicate that the course successfully resulted in shifts in student attitudes and that students reported a commitment to ongoing community engagement and personal action. The findings underscore the need for meaningful integration of environmental literacy into engineering curricula, through implementation of evidence-based pedagogical strategies, in order to train future engineers with an understanding of the relationship between their work and the environment.