"EELISA SusCo Community
Interdisciplinarity for Sustainable Competences in Engineering Education

The aim of the EELISA SusCo Community is to support sustainability and transversal skill development for the new European Engineer by enhancing interdisciplinary education in the engineering curricula. Engineers are key contributors to the efforts to achieve the Sustainability Development Goals set up by the Agenda 2030. The complex sustainability challenges require complex and not traditional solutions, and an interdisciplinarity approach could facilitate and support the development of potential solutions. Interdisciplinarity as a tool of sustainable education can equip future engineers the necessary sustainability and transversal skillset to successfully face the global sustainability challenges. With our partner institutions, we will delve into research, discussion, and knowledge exchange to develop a guideline on how to integrate interdisciplinarity into engineering education to upskill the students for sustainability challenges.

Our initial plan for the community project is as follows, each community member would be involved in each task – or as per discussed and agreed.

The overall aim of our community is to put a stronger emphasis on interdisciplinary education in the engineering curricula to enable future engineers to achieve the SDGs by 2030. A guidebook will be developed as an outcome about how to improve the necessary sustainability and transversal skillset of the modern European Engineer through interdisciplinarity education.

Project plan:

• Project meetings: several online (eg: one in every month), and maximum 3 in-person project meetings/workshops between October 2022 - October 2023 (covered by EELISA Communities funding). 
• Selecting the best research approach and methods to specify the role of interdisciplinarity in developing sustainability skills needed for future engineers
• Plan, design and execute the research in each partner's country, and analyze the results. 
• By consulting experts from different fields (from pedagogy, coaching, facilitators, etc.) designing the best methods for skill development for both professors and engineering students  
• Prepare the guidelines to support integration of interdisciplinarity in engineering education throughout the EELISA partner universities. The end result will be a guidebook that would support the local implementations.  
• Dissemination: a downloadable guidebook and an online webinar 

In the framework of the BME EELISA communities call, only mobility activities can be covered, therefore any other costs, eg. the potential survey  - translation of the questions/results-  should be minimized - and covered by each partner. Our plan is to execute these activities in-house by involving Ph.D. students."