Papers by Gemma Tejedor Papell
Education for Sustainable Development in Higher Education Institutions
World sustainability series, 2024
Multicultural Constructive Community Learning Course for Education in Sustainable Development Applying Backcasting
World sustainability series, Oct 7, 2014
The International Seminar on Sustainable Technology Innovation is a course offered in the framewo... more The International Seminar on Sustainable Technology Innovation is a course offered in the framework of the master of Sustainability of the UPC-Barcelona Tech University and financed by the ERASMUS Intensive Program scheme. It introduces backcasting scenarios methodology in real sustainability problems. The learning environment is international, transdisciplinary, intergenerational and intercultural. It includes stakeholders’ dialogues and discussions. The course is organized around current sustainability relevant topics that are analysed in study cases based in different contexts: going from developed to developing countries and from local to global cases. Students apply scenario methodologies to the study cases in order to set up the most contextualized sustainable strategies. The course is structured in four phases: first the local situation analysis where students analyse the topic in their own countries/regions; then students are grouped in international multidisciplinary teams and define the state of the art of the case studies; afterwards students, lecturers and stakeholders meet in Barcelona where the course is run for two weeks and finally students analyse their learning experience in terms of competences acquisition. The topics analysed in the course vary each year and are related to relevant sustainability challenges: urban solid waste management; food and drinks packaging waste; overfishing and marine ecosystem degradation; sustainable mobility, agro-ecology and sustainable community energy systems. In 2014 UPC Barcelona Tech is running the course for the seventh time and so far more than 170 students, 40 lecturers and 60 stakeholders have participated in the course from 39 countries. This paper explains the learning environment and the challenges and lessons learnt when organizing such a course, and the learning results obtained by students.
Sustainability, Aug 24, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Trends in Higher Education
This paper features a methodology for embedding and assessing a competency in an academic curricu... more This paper features a methodology for embedding and assessing a competency in an academic curriculum using competency maps. This methodology enables embedding and assessment of any competency in any curriculum, regardless of the educational level, as long as the competency is correctly described by means of a competency map. As an example of the application of this methodology, a proposal for embedding and assessing sustainability in engineering degrees is presented. A competency map embodies the set of learning outcomes of the competency that students should have acquired upon completion of their studies. This information allows the designers of the curriculum to determine the learning outcomes that should be developed in the degree and to distribute them appropriately among the subjects. The presence map can be constructed from the competency map. It contains information regarding the extent to which each learning outcome of the competency map is being developed in the degree. Thi...
Sustainability Science, 2019
The EDINSOST2-SDG project: introducing SDGs in higher education
Towards a new future in engineering education, new scenarios that European alliances of tech universities open up: SEFI 2022: 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education: 19-22 September, Barcelona, Spain: proceedings
The main objective of the EDINSOST2-SDG project is to introduce sustainability and the Sustainabl... more The main objective of the EDINSOST2-SDG project is to introduce sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Higher Education. The project focuses on Engineering degrees, Education Degrees, and the Business Administration and Management degrees of the Spanish university system. The project has four main objectives: (O1) Identify the SDGs in the EDINSOST sustainability competency maps (SCM); (O2) Improve the learning outcomes of sustainability and SDGs in the degrees related to the project; (O3) Faculty training in Education for Sustainability and SDGs; and (O4) Analyse the students’ learning in Sustainability and SDGs during their training at the university. The current project began in 2019 and is scheduled to end in December 2022. This paper presents the main results achieved so far in the O1. SDGs have been included in the SCMs previously designed by the EDINSOST project. Each SCM learning outcome is related to a set of UNESCO learning objectives and UN indicato...
Two contemporary academic movements can be argued to be important for the integration of more fie... more Two contemporary academic movements can be argued to be important for the integration of more fieldpracticeand cross disciplinary team-based learning experiences into the engineering education curriculum. Firstly, the growth of research in sustainability challenges in combination with the need for change in engineering education, which is seen to evolve from environmental focus to the inclusion of social and transdisciplinary approaches. Secondly, the evolution of engineering education in general: from traditional and instructive to student centered, constructive and practice oriented as well as from isolated and exclusive to an inter-twined part of society, where society’s need for “socially responsible future entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders”. This implies that all engineers need to be equipped with knowledge, skills, values and experiences in order to meet the needs of society. Challenge driven education (CDE) is an evolving concept that can bridge engineering and sustainabi...
Actions for sustainability are promoted from the different areas of environment, society, technol... more Actions for sustainability are promoted from the different areas of environment, society, technology and economy, with the common aspiration to face interconnected crises in a world that can no longer be conceived as “society without nature and nature without society”. From this imperative for the integration of epistemics, university is called to restructuring boundaries and processes to properly serve society. Given that engineering principles are aligned with that logic, it is argued that engineering education (EE) have to evolve to being engineering-problem oriented and further developed into socio-technically oriented. Transdisciplinarity emerged in this context pursuing integration of academic and practical or traditional knowledge outside the academia, to co-produce outcomes both socially robust and transferable, that is, useful for transitioning and scientifically innovative to formulate new guiding principles. In order to improve engineering education in sustainability (EES...
Sustainability, 2021
This paper presents three tools developed within the framework of the project EDINSOST2-SDG, aime... more This paper presents three tools developed within the framework of the project EDINSOST2-SDG, aimed at embedding and assessing the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Engineering curricula. ESD is promoted through the introduction into engineering curricula of learning outcomes related to sustainability and, specifically, to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The first tool, the “Engineering Sustainability Map”, contains ESD-related learning outcomes that any engineering student should have acquired upon completion of their studies. These learning outcomes are described according to four sustainability competencies: (1) Critical contextualization of knowledge, (2) Sustainable use of resources, (3) Participation in community processes, and (4) Application of ethical principles. The second tool, the “Sustainability Presence Map” of a degree, shows the percentage of the presence in the curriculum of each sustainability competency. The calculation of the presence of each...
Sustainability, 2019
Higher education is a principal agent for addressing the sustainable development goals proposed b... more Higher education is a principal agent for addressing the sustainable development goals proposed by the 2030 Agenda, because of its key mission of knowledge generation, teaching and social innovation for sustainability. In order to achieve this, higher education needs to integrate transversally the values of sustainability in the way of developing the field of management, as well as research, university life and, of course, teaching. This paper focuses on teaching, and more specifically on the didactic strategies considered most relevant for training in sustainability competencies in college students, according to the guidelines commonly accepted by the international academic community. Through collaborative work among experts from six Spanish universities taking part in the EDINSOST project (education and social innovation for sustainability), funded by the Spanish R&D+i Program, in this paper the role of five active learning strategies (service learning, problem-based learning, pro...
EESD 2021: Proceedings of the 10th Engineering Education for Sustainable Development Conference, 'Building Flourishing Communities', Jun 14, 2021
Two contemporary academic movements can be argued to be important for the integration of more fie... more Two contemporary academic movements can be argued to be important for the integration of more fieldpractice-and cross disciplinary team-based learning experiences into the engineering education curriculum. Firstly, the growth of research in sustainability challenges in combination with the need for change in engineering education, which is seen to evolve from environmental focus to the inclusion of social and transdisciplinary approaches. Secondly, the evolution of engineering education in general: from traditional and instructive to student centered, constructive and practice oriented as well as from isolated and exclusive to an intertwined part of society, where society's need for "socially responsible future entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders". This implies that all engineers need to be equipped with knowledge, skills, values and experiences in order to meet the needs of society. Challenge driven education (CDE) is an evolving concept that can bridge engineering and sustainability. In the challenge driven education, students are working on real-life and often real-time challenges in society and industry. The students work with open-ended, ill-defined problems that do not have a single right answer. With the challenge driven education approach, the aim is to position ideas, innovations and decision making in the forefront of the learning process. InnoEnergy is a transnational educational initiative supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). From the investigation made on the integration of CDE in seven international and crossborder InnoEnergy Masters' programs, the need appeared for a common understanding on CDE within the knowledge innovation community. The investigation aimed to explore: the perceived drivers and barriers for CDE; the different approaches for integrating CDE in the seven masters' programs; and the perceived scope for CDE mapped to the achievement of competences for sustainability. Preliminary findings showed that there was a common core of successful initiation of the integration of the CDE approach, although differently in the seven masters' programs, from different perceptions of CDE for sustainability within the community. Furthermore, the findings revealed a narrow view of sustainability, where the concept is implicitly integrated or "obviously" in some programs with a intend at finding more sustainable energy solutions. An InnoEnergy CDE White Paper has been elaborated, setting the goal for the future progress of challenge driven InnoEnergy MSc education. The paper contributes the definition behind this concept and a strategy on the future development, as well as some best practices of the work so far. Furthermore, the overarching Engineering Education for Sustainable Development
EESD 2021: Proceedings of the 10th Engineering Education for Sustainable Development Conference, 'Building Flourishing Communities', Jun 14, 2021
Design has a key role to play in developing innovative solutions to current challenges-approaches... more Design has a key role to play in developing innovative solutions to current challenges-approaches that must consider the needs of end users and integrate sustainability criteria in processes and strategies for creating products and services. The Circular Design Project (http://circulardesigneurope.eu/) is a European project funded by Erasmus+ Knowledge Alliance within the social business and the educational innovation field. The goal of this Circular Design project is to promote sustainable production and consumption of products and services in Europe. The project have four objectives: to increase and improve the learning strategies of Design for Sustainability, identifying opportunities for sustainably designed products and services as well as business opportunities in both higher education institutions and industries in Europe; To gather and cluster open educational resources and training courses for industry staff and academics in Innovative Design for Sustainability; To train up innovative and entrepreneurial designers who are capable of dealing with a transition towards Design for Sustainability as a mainstream design approach, as well as to promote cooperation and mobility with the EU's partner countries; and to establish a basis for a permanent and active European Network of Design for Sustainability. This was achieved through a knowledge co-creation process and the development and pilot training materials in order to teach and train students, faculty and enterprise staff of the design sector. The project formed by 12 partners is organised around four country hubs in Ireland, The Netherlands, Catalonia and Sweden. Each country Hub consists of one university with education and research in
Sustainability issues are widely recognized as wicked problems, which should not be considered as... more Sustainability issues are widely recognized as wicked problems, which should not be considered as problems to be solved, but as conditions to be governed. There is a general agreement on the need to reform scientific expertise as it is required to deal with sustainability challenges, by developing new ways of knowledge production and decision-making. Transdisciplinary aspects of sustainability are widely acknowledged as a transformational stream of sustainability science. However, when entering transdisciplinarity, also encompassing social sciences and humanities, engineering researchers enter unfamiliar grounds. Advancing sustainable engineering science requires creating new long-term, participatory, solution -oriented programs as platforms to recognize and engage with the macro-ethical, adaptive, and cross-disciplinary challenges embedded in professional issues. Furthermore, the difficulties to change engineering education are broadly analyzed: anachronistic pedagogy, mismatched i...
International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 2019
Purpose This paper aims to identify patterns and trends taking place in engineering education in ... more Purpose This paper aims to identify patterns and trends taking place in engineering education in sustainability, through analyzing the evolution of research conducted in relevant publications in the field of engineering education for sustainability in the past decades. Design/methodology/approach First, a bibliometric approach has been applied, adopting a co-word analysis based on co-occurrence of the keywords (300 items) in articles from three indexed journals related to engineering, education or sustainability. The selection of the articles has been based on the appearance of the previous three terms in the topic and title fields of the journal, where journal scope (based in the categories of the InCites Journal Citation Reports) covered at least two topics, and the third topic was applied in the search, as follows: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education – Scope of the journal: sustainability and education, Keyword search: engineering (20 papers); Journal of C...
The global engineer in Sustainable Human Development CHAPTER 1 A.3 - (Re)Shaping knowledge: The contribution of Sustainability Science
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2018
Sustainability issues, as unwanted results of not fully respecting natural cycles, are widely rec... more Sustainability issues, as unwanted results of not fully respecting natural cycles, are widely recognized as wicked problems, which should not be thought of as problems to be solved, but rather as "conditions" to be managed, as if they were a chronic disease (Seager et al., 2011). There exists a general agreement on the need to reform scientific expertise by developing new ways of knowledge production and decision-making able to cope with the challenges sustainability poses. In this sense, transdisciplinary aspects of sustainability are acknowledged as a transformational stream of sustainability science. Transdisciplinarity is considered a competence for sustainability in technological curriculums. Nevertheless, engineering education professionals tread on unfamiliar ground when entering transdisciplinarity approach, as it includes social sciences and humanities perspectives. Advancing sustainable engineering science requires creating new long-term, participatory, solution-oriented programs as platforms to recognize and engage with the macro-ethical, adaptive and cross-disciplinary challenges embedded in professional issues. Meanwhile, individual university professors and researchers take a step forward to try out innovative experiences in their classrooms to deal with complexity and reach holism in fostering knowledge in different ways. This paper analyses first what is being done and how is it being focused, and second, What are the strategies for and purposes of implementing transdisciplinary experiences in engineering higher education. This analysis is a starting point to analyse transdisciplinarity in engineering education for sustainability and to construct the education framework (curriculum structure, faculty competences, pedagogical approaches, etc.) that best facilitates the practice of transdisciplinarity in engineering education.
Sustainability Science, 2017
The Research Institute for Sustainability Science and Technology under the Master degree in Susta... more The Research Institute for Sustainability Science and Technology under the Master degree in Sustainability Science and Technology organises the course Action Research Workshop on Science and Technology for Sustainability (5 ECTS). The authors have been coordinating the course during the academic years 13/14, 14/15 and 15/16. The purpose of the workshop is to put together civil society organisations, local administrations, students and educators to collaboratively undertake responsible research, performing transdisciplinary learning environments and using actionresearch framework, to answer questions such as: Who are we researching for? Who profits from our research? What are the impacts of our research? Which methodologies and tools should be used? While dealing with sociotechnical sustainability challenges. Students work on real projects, related to local sustainability problems, represented by a community entity (Service learning and Campus Lab). Action research methodology is used with a two-cycle approach. In each real-life project, students, faculty and stakeholders are asked to follow the actionreflexion process of action research projects: Action 1-Jointly defining: Project purpose; Customer and interest; Involved actors; Reflexion 1-Students define: research question, initial situation, needed additional information, action Strategy, Tasks planning and distribution: Action 2 -Items returning and discussing with stakeholders, Reflexion 2 -revising and reformulating. After three editions, we can conclude that: First, students realized the significance of framing an investigation under a research methodological framework that allows bringing research to the community, enhancing transdisciplinarity in any initiative or action in sustainability science. They set out the importance of some topics and the difficulty to hold them. Second, the formulation of the problem became one of the most arduous task in the process; difficulties were mainly related to the perception of the problem from distinct community group motivations. Third, interaction and communication with stakeholders and the recognition of their role was problematic as usually engineering students are not train to work in wicked problems and accompanying stakeholders during the whole process. Finally, it is relevant to highlight that during the process students faced conflict and frustrating situations, within their team and with stakeholders. To face that, an Emotional Intelligence module was introduced in the workshop and helped students to solve some paralyzing situations, which could have stopped the progress of the project. We suggest that engineering students need specific training in transdisciplinary research and in conflict resolution, otherwise they could collapse in frustration when dealing with real transdisciplinary sustainability transitions.
Sustainability issues are widely recognized as wicked problems [1], which should not be considere... more Sustainability issues are widely recognized as wicked problems [1], which should not be considered as problems to be solved, but as conditions to be governed [2]. There is a general agreement on the need to reform scientific expertise to deal with sustainability challenges, by developing new ways of knowledge production and decision-making. In that sense, Sterling [3] maintains that the nature of sustainability requires a fundamental change of epistemology and education. Transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge emphasize phenomena complexity, disrupting and transcending epistemological structures to progressively reflect and gain understanding [4]. In relation to engineering education, the Barcelona Declaration [5] highlights the sustainability competences, that engineering students should achieve.
La enorme produccion de residuos, y las consiguientes dificultades para su eliminacion, es un pro... more La enorme produccion de residuos, y las consiguientes dificultades para su eliminacion, es un problema central de las sociedades modernas economicamente desarrolladas. Es central por estar incrustado en la propia naturaleza del sistema economico de produccion y consumo de masas, que genera una ingente cantidad de residuos y en continuo aumento, con el consiguiente riesgo para la salud de las personas, los animales y vegetales, y el medioambiente en general. El presente estudio El ciclo de materiales en la UPC: Aproximacion a la percepcion social de los residuos y su gestion en la ETSAV y la ESAB, se ha realizado dentro de una investigacion mas amplia que tiene en cuenta otros ejes: el estudio y analisis de la gobernabilidad y el analisis y evaluacion de los flujos de materiales en el ambito de los residuos, en las dos escuelas, en el marco estrategico en sostenibilidad en la UPC es el Plan UPC Sostenible 2015. La aproximacion a la percepcion social permite revisar las formas de pens...
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Papers by Gemma Tejedor Papell