Sustainable development and diversifying competencies curricula

Abstract

This paper explores the question how to approach thinking about curriculum construction for European engineering schools in the age of sustainable development. We present a theoretical argument that curriculum thinkers need to broaden their focus from the “restricted competences” paradigm (RCP) in curriculum thinking to consider how to make curricula within a diversifying competences paradigm (DCP). We claim that the best response to the challenge of sustainability is to produce more skill-diversity among engineers while simultaneously training engineers to make the most of this diversity. We support this claim with two arguments. First, we explore the problem-solving power of diversely skilled collectives, suggesting that this increases relative to homogenous collectives when confronting complex problems. Then we show that sustainable development is not only a complex problem, but an extremely complex or wicked problem. Based on these two conclusions, we propose a mixed-medium curricular model which illustrates how engineering schools might be reformed in order to produce greater student competence diversification.