Abstract:

In 2015, the United Nations approved the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development, an opportunity for countries and their societies to embark on a new path to improve the lives of all, leaving no one behind. The Agenda has 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), ranging from the elimination of poverty to the fight against climate change, education, equality for women, the defense of the environment, or the design of our cities. This goal is already at the center of the vision of the States and of the action of the National Governments. Notwithstanding, to achieve the goals of each objective every actor has to do their part: governments, the private sector, civil society, and people, and of course the University. Actually, in this context the Universities perform a double mission: on the one hand, they have to incorporate the SDGs in their substantive activity, that is, in their teaching, research, transfer, and management, attracting interest in training and researching transferable solutions to society that contribute to the SDGs; on the other hand, Universities play a primary role as transforming agents of society as a whole.

The Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering (ETSII) of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), in Spain, is aware that one of our fundamental priorities must be to train not only engineering professionals but also entrepreneur people committed to sustainability. The Project of Innovation and Educational Improvement (PIME-I/2021/1790) recently granted at the ETSII is framed in the field of developing actions to contribute to the achievement of the SDGs, focusing on the first area of intervention, that is, in the teaching field, but without forgetting the existing interrelation with the other three areas mentioned above (research, transfer and institutional policy). The first step is to make a mapping of the approach of both foreign and national Universities to include the SDGs in the university curricula, as well as specific teaching and learning methodologies that are applied in Engineering studies particularly, to both Graduate and Master levels. On the international scene, the top 10 Universities in the 2021 ranking of Times Higher Education (THE) have been explored. At the national level, the 11 Spanish Universities ranked among the 200 best in the world have been investigated, where UPV is number 20 worldwide in goal 12 of Responsible production and consumption. This is the starting point to the design and implementation of good practices from the focus of sustainability within the framework of the 12 official degrees taught at ETSII (5 Bachelor Degrees and 7 Master level). The ETSII has an enormous responsibility in this sense, due to the multiplier effect that education unleashes, thus impacting on the sustainable development of society, through its more than 4000 students.

Keywords:

Sustainable development goals, higher education, university, engineering, educational innovation and improvement, implementation, active methodologies.